This is a kind of tricky thing to navigate and talk about. I'm just asking for kindness and understanding. I know I will sound very prejudiced.

This is hard for me because I know it could open up a can of worms, but I don't know where else I can discuss this. If the admins think it's best to delete this, I understand.

I was abused very badly by both sides of my family. I grew up being beaten with hangers and belts. My biological father would try to teach me math, and if I gave the wrong answer or didn't know the answer, he would beat me. He said he got the idea from the country he grew up in. When he was in school his teachers would beat the kids for not getting their work done. When I got older, he'd complain about U.S. child abuse laws and say, "if we were living in [country] I'd be beating you every day" . It's considered a parent's right to abuse their kids where he comes from. My maternal grandmother is very toxic and I grew up hating her. I once watched her attack her grown daughter. I was 10 at the time.

At first, I thought it was just my family. Maybe I was being unfair. But I experienced a lot of cruelty and abuse from others who are of the same culture. It reinforced my bias. I was looking up articles recently, and I found a UN study that reveals 50% of women from my parents ' country are abused at some point.

I don't want to say exactly where my family is from, but there is an issue there of serious crimes and little money to hire more police, so domestic violence is often brushed away as a minor problem. This exacerbates the abuse people experience.

My family watched us get abused and protected the abuser because, as my grandmother said, "he was your father, he could do what he wanted with you." I still hate her for this. The last time he hit me, I was 24.

I do blame the culture a lot for what I went through. I hate the culture, and sometimes I hate the people. I know it's not a nice thing to say. I know that abuse happens everywhere, but I feel like if I was born into a different family, it would have been better for me. Has anyone else gone through this? How do you cope with it?