The values and beliefs of a culture or a religion affect a family’s feelings and responses to abusive relationships. Therefore, parents must consider their values and beliefs when making assessments and decisions about their teen’s situation. Sometimes these cultural influences are barriers to a family’s effectiveness—for example, when families create “stories” about what is happening that interfere with the family’s ability or willingness to understand and seek help. Other times, cultural traditions provide supportive strengths and resources to the family.
Cultural values and beliefs about relationships, dating, marriage, sex, and seeking help influence every family’s way of dealing with an abusive relationship. For example, the values of your culture may require marriage to the person your daughter has sex with or, if she is pregnant, to the father of her child. This presents a conflict for you if you are also worried about a marriage filled with violence.
Cultural views about dating and sexuality affect how parents react to dating violence. A family may prohibit dating or prescribe certain rules about it. This may lead a teen to keep her dating activities hidden from parents and other family members. Parents may feel angry that their teen has violated their values or broken their rules, and then become angrier when they discover she has also been hurt by the person she is dating.
Some parents’ cultural traditions include views of marriage and relationships between men and women whereby the man is the head of the household, in charge and responsible for disciplining and keeping control over his wife or girlfriend. These parents may also believe that women are to blame for the problems that arise in intimate relationships and are solely responsible for fixing them (rather than this being a shared responsibility of both men and women). These attitudes affect what teens expect as normal in their relationships, and they affect how parents react to their teen’s abusive relationship.
Some parents are reluctant to see the abuser or the victim get involved with the criminal justice system or other sources of help because their family is part of a group or community that has been discriminated against. This can create conflict between dual allegiances: to the teen, who may need the help, as well as to the abuser, who may be treated badly because of racism or other prejudices.
Sometimes communities or families have experienced tremendous trauma, change, or distress, perhaps due to a history of violence, poverty, or, in the case of some immigrants, war in their country of origin. In comparison to these experiences, their daughters’ problems with a boyfriend may not seem as serious. Your values and beliefs about what constitutes a serious problem will affect how you react. For example, many communities, such as those from Iraq, Somalia, Cambodia, or Mexico, have experienced genocidal massacres or torture, or very difficult journeys as immigrants or refugees. Having survived enormous tragedies affects how you respond to crises that arise in your family life. You may expect your daughter to tolerate or resign herself to the situation she is in.
It is often difficult in an oppressed community to expose violence or any other problem that contradicts the image of the culture as being free of such problems. For example, Jewish cultural attitudes might consider family violence as a shanda (shame). Asian Americans are sometimes seen as a “model minority,” which may lead some of these families to keep family violence invisible. African American families are often reluctant to report family violence because of a sense of shame and their vulnerability to discrimination based on racism.
Culture and traditions provide strength to families and individuals. The culture in which we have grown up affects our beliefs, values, behavior, and how we deal with problems. There are differences in terms of what will be effective for each of us and each of our families in dealing with interpersonal violence. Our culture, ethnic group, religion, and economic background all contribute to forming a complicated set of influences, constraints, and resources.
People often rely on cultural traditions for sanctuary and support. They offer ways of seeing problems so that people feel comforted and able to understand what is happening to them. They offer communities shared values with which to maintain a sense of belonging and connection. They offer ancestral and collective histories that form and inform identities. People benefit from rituals and traditions that help them move from one phase of life to another. Prayers, for example, can be important for healing. People find resources in cultural communities that help to solve problems. They seek support from religious and spiritual leaders, teachers, and guides.
There has been a social revolution affecting institutions that used to rely upon the “normalcy” of certain aspects of family life—for example, methods of disciplining children, rights of husbands and fathers to control their families, and courtship practices. This revolution has affected legal definitions in the United States of what constitutes abuse. Abuse is now defined by the experiences of the people who have been abused, which has challenged the perception and acceptance of abuse as an invisible and normal part of life. Previously unquestioned authority is being challenged. Girls and women have new rights, including the right to be free from abuse and violence. They don’t have to accept abuse in their relationships. Relationships themselves are being redefined; for example, many states now grant same-sex couples the same rights and privileges heterosexual couples have.
The changing roles and status of women and girls in the United States have presented challenges and provoked conflict within some cultures, communities, and families. In some families that have recently immigrated to the United States, parents often form a bridge from the old to the new, wanting better lives for their children. They do not want them to experience the limitations that they themselves experienced in their own countries or cultures of origin. Forming this bridge can be complicated and difficult because parents and children go through different experiences as they adapt to a new country. But parents must make choices, and even if those choices conflict with cultural or religious values, they are important for the protection and safety of our children. Changing beliefs means taking risks.
The following are examples of beliefs related to relationship violence that exist in some cultures, including the dominant culture in this country:
People who are conflicted about their culture’s beliefs and values must make choices. Using culture as an excuse for violence is avoiding responsibility. If you say, “He or she behaves violently because of their culture,” or “In our religion, she must marry him since she is with him, even if he hits her,” you make the culture responsible for the violence, rather than holding individuals responsible for their choices. It is important to challenge such beliefs and to hold people who are violent accountable and responsible, whether or not the culture or social environment tolerates it. People who challenge such beliefs are less likely to “blame the victim.” When parents actively intervene on their teen’s behalf, the teen knows that she has the right to be treated with respect, that she doesn’t deserve to be abused, and that abuse is never acceptable—in any culture.
A family’s culture influences decisions about whether to act and what kind of action to take, including where to go for help. Decisions about seeking help from schools, the legal system, friends, or family depend on what fits with each family’s values and beliefs, as well as the resources available within their culture and their community.
Supports that are available within your culture can be helpful and empowering, as they can provide understanding, trust, and familiarity. Seeking help within your community may be necessary because of expectations or experiences of criticism, judgmental responses, or discrimination outside the community. Language can be a barrier to seeking help outside the community. Language and communication style may be misunderstood, especially if English is not the parents’ primary language and their ability to communicate is affected by stress. Cultural values may emphasize helping people within one’s own community, and a family’s community may offer resources for personal support. For example, in many communities, church and civil rights organizations provide a wide variety of services. Culturally sensitive services are available in many cities—for example, multilingual Asian service centers, Armenian school-based centers, Jewish family services, and Spanish-speaking programs for Latinas who have been battered.
Seeking help within the community, however, can pose problems as well. In a closed, small, or tight-knit community, privacy is limited. Cultural values can lead some families to feel shameful if a relationship problem is revealed, especially a problem such as sexual violence. Some families prefer to seek help outside their communities for privacy and confidentiality reasons.
Parents who have recently arrived in the United States face the enormous task of learning how this country’s laws, institutions, and policies work, and what to expect. Getting help or planning for a teen’s safety means learning new methods of dealing with those that are different from what is familiar to parents and others in the family.
Repeated experiences with discrimination affect parents’ and teens’ willingness to rely on institutions. For example, an African American teen who expects her boyfriend to be arrested and jailed may be reluctant to call the police because she’s experienced discrimination or harassment by police, or has seen it happen to others in her community. A teen who has a young child may expect to be discriminated against if she reports abuse, because of the scrutiny teen mothers are subjected to when seen as “inadequate” parents, and possibly risk having her child taken away. Undocumented residents in the United States are frequently afraid of deportation if they seek help, even though there are legal protections for undocumented victims of crime.
Discrimination based on stereotyped expectations and misperceptions of behavior can lead to parents or teens being misunderstood. For example, if your culture and customs make it unacceptable for you to tell strangers about personal problems, your difficulty talking to a supportive person might be misunderstood as unwillingness to cooperate. Lack of communication can lead to you being judged, blamed, or criticized for your behavior when seeking help. It is important to remember that even though people who are supposed to help can sometimes be insensitive, they often have useful resources to offer.
As parents, we often find ourselves confronting the ways in which we grew up differently from our children. Our children constantly remind us that “it’s different now—it’s not the way it was back then.” Some of us look to cultural traditions for perspectives on what is happening with our children, and others do not. But it is important for all of us to find new ways to support our children as they deal with the realities of their lives.