Within South Asian communities, sexual, economic, mental, and physical abuse can be found. Abuse in this community is fueled by a variety of factors, including generational trauma, stigma around divorce, preferential treatment of sons, and more. The normalization of abuse in South Asian communities ultimately upholds negative cultural attitudes and behaviors that are passed down through generations.
According to the National Library of Medicine, 40% of South Asian women have experienced abuse. In a study evaluating life experiences of intimate partner violence, out of 56 Indian and Pakistani women, 96% have experienced physical abuse, and 64% have experienced sexual violence by an intimate partner. Additionally, according to UNICEF.org, over half of the children in the world who have suffered from abusive families, 64% of them being South Asian.
The cultural standards of being a good wife in a South Asian family consists of taking care of the children, having as many children as possible, especially sons. It additionally includes taking care of the household chores, and being submissive to their husband. Being pressured by one’s family and husband to have children pressures a woman to have sex purely for procreation. If a woman is pressured to have a child, she will likely resent the child and may, subconsciously, blame them for her unfortunate circumstances, creating a pattern of emotional abuse experienced by many South Asian children. This pattern desensitizes the behavior and continues the cycle. Making a child believe that they are unwanted or that they are the reason for their mother’s misfortune, creates a world where a child feels that they don’t belong. This experience makes the child do anything they can, to please and make their parents proud, in order to get reassurance and acceptance. Along with having children, South Asian husbands often prevent their wives from working; thus, trapping them in the relationship, so the woman doesn’t have the economic means to escape the toxic relationship.
By continuing to subject children to abuse, the message is one of tolerance, and in no way should anyone tolerate abuse. Many South Asian parents also outwardly prefer their sons over their daughters, and often enforce harsher regulations on the daughters in comparison to their sons. For instance, from birth, male children are treated like royalty, since there is a large importance around “carrying on the family name” through the men in the family. As they grow up, boys are taught that they are more valuable and dominant to women. Parents generally excuse male bad behavior, give them more freedom, and grant males more general privileges. Males are allowed freedom to go out with their friends and make their own decisions, and females are not. Teaching boys that they are inherently more valuable than women, sets them up to reject criticism and they become ignorant to the consequences of their actions. This mindset has the potential to create an abusive individual, since it manifests from a superiority complex. Additionally, the daughters of South Asian parents that openly prefer their sons, have the ideology that they are not good enough and ultimately inferior to their friends, intimate partners, and other people around them just because they were born a girl instead of a boy. This mindset causes them to tolerate abuse, thus continuing the cycle of domestic abuse.
Many people, especially South Asian parents, may argue that their behavior within the home is not abusive, and doesn’t negatively affect their children. However, if this argument were true, the pattern of abuse in South Asian communities wouldn’t exist. People in the South Asian community should work towards not normalizing abuse by working towards dismantling cultural standards that are ultimately infeasible to meet and predispose people to abuse.