Where do you draw the line between abuse and cultural practice? How do you know when you’re condemning something just because it is not of your culture?
Or is there some objective standard of child discipline or treatment?
Basically I want a way to say something like beating a child with a shovel or burning their hand on a gas stove is wrong, that doesn’t rely on my internal cultural programming.
I define it by what California Child Protective Services defines as abuse. Every case is going to be different, but they all fall under the umbrella guideline:
1.) Are the child’s basic needs provided for?
2.) Is the child placed in situations that compromise their own safety?
CPS says that in regarding discipline, you can spank your child on the buttocks so long as it doesn’t leave any marks. Any discipline that leaves marks- broken bones, bruises, welts, scratches, etc. can be cause for criminal prosecution and child removal. However I would take it a step further and say any punishment intended to be extremely painful yet specifically designed to avoid leaving marks should be a huge no-no (shocking your kid with electricity as punishment, or forcing them to hold a drop of tabasco sauce on their tongue).
Child abuse often falls under patterns. Parents that abuse their children for years on end often have elaborate measures to prevent discovery by the authorities. They might homeschool their kid, never let them outside/talk to anyone, or isolate them in various other ways. Generally these measures are done so that nobody will notice all the abuse they are dealing to their child.
If your child is yapping and causing you to get so angry you whack them across the head with your beer mug, chances are someone is going to see the marks or symptoms of a concussion. But if you homeschool the kid, never let them outside, etc, this type of abuse can go on for years before anyone knows something is amiss.
On one side of the coin we have helicopter parents and people rolling their eyes at the idea a single mom would get arrested for leaving her daughter at a park alone while she is at work. But the other end of the specrum is abuse that goes on for a long time, either because people don’t see it, or refuse to do anything about it. 
When I lived in Taiwan I had an apartment in a local neighborhood.
I was always surprised to see very young children up quite late at night. It seemed that these children were treated as an adult and went to bed when they felt like it. Children seemed never to be put to bed at a certain hour to make sure they got enough sleep. Pediatricians in the US recommend at least 10 to 12 hours of sleep for small children. Kids in the neighborhood I was living in Taipei, sure weren’t getting that. They would be up early to get to school. Doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on them, though. They seem to grow up fine.
Makes me think of the Marjoe Gortner case, where the parents held the kid’s head underwater…
In a slightly less physically horrible way, but in a way that is, perhaps, ultimately worse, simply withholding love from a child can cause irreparable psychological harm. Name-calling leaves scars too, of a sort. Moral abuse of this sort is terribly common, and very difficult to prove in court.
I don’t know if this is even a cultural thing since I’ve heard these statements across different cultures, but I have heard people from various groups state that taking a baby outside before it’s x months old and not completely bundling it up (like as in putting it in winter clothes on a 60 degree day) is tantamount to abuse.
I was under the impression that a) keeping a baby indoors can lead to or exacerbate post partum depression since that isolates the mother and b) babies maybe need one extra layer than an adult, that’s all.
I seriously had co-workers saying that my other co-worker, when she walked around with her 3 month old, was going to kill her child!
Well, there’s this:
Paying a man to cut off part of your baby’s penis and suck the blood from the wound with his mouth while your friends and family watch seems nearly as abusive and twisted as it could get, but I guess that’s just my ethnocentrism talking.
Why has no one brought up female genital mutilation?
Well, I just did.
Wow, that’s terrible.
Something I noticed is how cases where someone gets in trouble over something supposedly benign they did with their kid (leave them at the park while they work their shift, for example) draw a ton of attention. But for every “CPS is overreacting!” case there are probably a thousand others where a ton of abuse is happening, but its so well hidden that they are able to fool CPS or it never gets brought to their attention. I mean we have PSA’s telling people not to shake their babies for crying out loud!
There was an earlier thread (too lazy to go look it up) where it was mentioned that in Nordic countries, parents routinely bundle their infants up, and then leave them outside in sub-zero weather while they get a cup of coffee, etc… in the thinking that fresh air is good for them.
Our cultural prejudice is that it’s horrible parenting, although they’ve clearly done it with little ill effect for quite a while.
I wish I could remember what island this was on.
The parents there don’t raise their kids, the other kids do. The parents are off doing their own thing, the kids are on their own. When a toddler fell in the water a little boy of about 5 or 6 pulled him out. Sometimes the kids will go off into the jungle and if they are gone for a few days nobody worries. If the kids can’t get home before dark they will find another group of their tribe to sleep with. Nobody seems too worried about their kids getting molested, or how long they are gone. The kids will start smoking as soon as they are old enough to hold a cigarette. When the government came around and wanted to send the kids to school the parents were against it. One man said his son was going to be 13 or 14 and would soon take a wife. It was time for him to learn how to build a place to live and what roots and bark were for what illnesses. When one of the boys got gored by a wild pig the men sat around and told jokes to take his mind off the pain of being stitched up.
By American standards they are horrible parents. The kids seemed happy and healthy, very confident and independent. Not a wuss among them.
And I think this contributes to the fear that CPS is arbitrary and capricious in terms of its policies and enforcement. If it’s Super Bowl weekend, the CPS workers want to hurry up and get ready for the game and will avoid looking too deeply at anything lest they get involved in something that would require a lot of work. When CPS workers come back from the Annual Isn’t Child Abuse and Neglect Awful Seminar where they cover horror stories from last year - well then get ready for your own horror story when a CPS worker thinks that your neglect in taking out the trash last Friday means that you are going to become the trash-filled horror home they saw in the presentation and they gotta take your kids away right now before they end up more traumatized.
When defending against arbitrary and capricious powers, generally the best defense isn’t “be reasonable”, but to be defensive and suspicious.