Men and Masculinities in Digital Public Discourse: Gendered Reactions to Teacher–Student Sexual Relations in Ghana

Abstract

This paper is an empirical investigation of how masculinity is constructed and the locus of responsibility in online communities responding to a scandalous teacher-student sexual relationship in Ghana. The research question is the gendered normalisation of sexual relations with a minor, in which case the digital discourse takes a specific form and continues to hold unequal moral standards. Online platforms were used in the collection of data, specifically the SecretNewsGhana and GhanaPage News, which led to a corpus of 85 user comments. The mixed-method design was used that incorporated the qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative statistical analysis using SPSS. The remarks were coded into five themes, which were celebratory masculinity, moral condemnation, humour and trivialisation, gender double standards, and responsibility debate. There was also an analysis of patterns of blame attribution in four categories namely: teacher blamed, student praised, shared responsibility and system blamed.