Why People Need to Stop Using “Culture” to Justify Abuse

This is a topic that makes me angry, because I know so many people who believe that they own their children and it’s perfectly okay to treat them however they want.

They won’t admit that’s what they think, but it’s obvious. Why else would it be so common that people are pressured into marrying their cousins or denied the option to marry someone they love because of nationality or family name? Why are children forced to wear hijab and beaten if they date or smoke? Why is it acceptable that some children aren’t allowed to access the internet? I know this isn’t everyone’s parents, but it’s common enough to be a disturbing trend. And some people never find out how violently their parents would try to control them because they never rebel enough to see.

And then there are parents who justify their abusive but not “that bad” actions by saying, “A typical Kuwaiti father would have beaten you up and stopped you from doing x, y, or z. You’re so lucky I didn’t do that.”

This tells me everything I need to know, because it suggests that a person cannot be doing something wrong if it is common in society. And that we have no right to ask for more than what is typical, no matter how limiting, abusive, and unfulfilling that typical is.

In other countries, your children can be taken away from you if you hurt them. Here we say, “What did she expect her family to do if they caught her with a boy?” Even people who claim to be against violence will defend the parents’ point of view if the offense is serious enough.

But the fact that this is normal in our society doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse. Abuse isn’t abuse because it’s rare; it’s abuse because of the effect it has on the child. That doesn’t change based on what country they’re in. A punch or a slap is going to feel the same no matter what the nationality is of the person receiving it, only they’re going to receive much less support and understanding in a culture that normalizes it. But the negative effects of corporal punishment on children don’t go away because you’re comfortable dismissing the scientific research that shows them. It just means you live in a place where the rejection of knowledge to preserve prejudice and tradition has been normalized—and that should frighten you.

Because the cultural acceptance of physical and emotional abuse makes a child less likely to identify it as such, they are not going to see the problem with repeating it themselves. If we could at least give it the proper name, we would know that what had been done to us was not normal or okay.

Many people struggle to actually term something abuse because they love their abuser. They think that abuse is only something a monster would do, and that isn’t their father/mother/brother/husband/wife. It can’t be a person considered normal in a given culture. But the issue is not black and white. You don’t have to be a terrible person in every way to abuse the people you love. You can have an abusive episode once or twice in your life and still generally be a good person. Abusers can be motivated by love, actually, or at least their version of it. Sometimes it doesn’t mean you’re evil, just very ignorant.

Parents never want to admit they’re bad parents. They can’t. It’s something too highly valued by the entire world for anyone to openly say, “I’m a bad parent,” and have that met with acceptance. Failing as a parent is the worst failure in the eyes of many, and that should make it especially important to do your very best. But too often all that happens is that people refuse to admit they have made terrible mistakes. Their child can lash out at them and even try to hurt themselves, but the parent will never realize it had something to do with them. They will blame anyone else before they look in the mirror because they can’t face the possibility that they failed as a parent.

When you’re surrounded by other abusive parents telling you you did the right thing, it just gives you permission to continue burying your head in the sand and ignore the damage you’ve done to your children. It’s almost like we look at our society as an example of the effects of perfect child-rearing. Why would we need to change? But Kuwait has a serious drug problem, struggles with mental illness, and one of the highest divorce rates in the world. We are doing something wrong.

We deny our children basic human rights even when they reach adulthood—we never accept that they are their own people and not first and foremost our children. Even when we have our legal rights, social and familial pressure keeps us from exercising them in full. We are asked to sacrifice our own happiness by the people who say they love us the most, not because it will actually benefit them, but because they believe they we should do what they say above all.

The message sent is that we do not deserve to be happy. We are denied things considered normal in most of the world but for some reason we are expected to do without them and not ask for more. We can’t imagine a future where this isn’t the case. Most people are allowed to marry who they love, to travel, to choose their religion, to choose their clothing, and most importantly, to make mistakes as children and teenagers without being hurt (or considered unmarry-able) . These things are not considered privileges. There are abusive parents everywhere, always, but at least this is the general expectation. What, then, is being done by parents who were never even held to this standard?

Maybe you read that list and felt uncomfortable imagining a Kuwait that is so different from the way it is now, or you interpreted it as a breakdown of religion. But that is a list of rights. Rights are what a person needs to live freely and happily; you cannot take them away and have a healthy society. Maybe this is why we care so much about reputation in Kuwait, because we cannot be happy within the framework of rules given to us, so the best we can do is pretend. Revealing our suffering is a rebellion, because we aren’t allowed to say, “This isn’t working.” Maybe we are scared of the shame that comes with failing, as if there is something bad about us that prevented us from living a good life within the bounds of good Kuwaiti moral values.

Instead of being understood, we told by Kuwaitis and Westerners alike that our culture, the very thing perpetuating our abuse, is the reason why our suffering should be invalidated and ignored. But we are still suffering, whether we are told we ought to or not.