
May 03, 2020, 07:53 AM
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Member Since: Jan 2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 3,260
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KD1980
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?
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I'm sorry to read what you have gone through. You didn't deserve that. I've been abused twice because of differing culture. One person treated me like absolute trash and called me every filthy name in the book, in keeping with her membership in a hate group; and the other abused me by attempting to force me to listen to her criticism of the entire race to which I belong -- she actually brought up "my culture". I stopped her at that point and told her "all that crap you just said about 'my culture'? I have no culture. I don't recognize anything of what you just said. Your prejudices have nothing to do with my reality. Maybe knowing that will help you understand my background and how I live my life." Then I ratted her out to her boss, cause I'd tried all the polite ways to stem her abuse, including asking her directly to stop and telling her in simple, unmistakeable terms that what she was saying and doing was wrong and hurtful to me.
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