Supplementary Content – Cultural Unlesses

Every culture has “unlesses".  These “unlesses” are the things a culture uses to justify men’s abuse of women.

We might not personally think these “unlesses" justify men’s violence, but broadly across Western culture, these “cultural unlesses” are used to reduce men’s responsibility when they hurt or abuse women.

We can tell what “unlesses” are used within a culture because of how media outlets report on the violence men perpetrate.  Men who kill their partners are described by newspapers as ‘jilted’, ‘broken-hearted’ or ‘pained by separation’. The woman they have killed is referred to as the ‘cheating wife’, or if he kills her during “rough sex”; he becomes the victim of her desire to be strangled.  The men have ‘lost it’, ‘flown into a rage’ or ‘freaked out’.

Anger specifically is a core Western “cultural unless”.  That is why the Cycle of Abuse generally involves abusers psyching themselves up into a state of pseudo anger. Afterwards they can claim that they lost control, that their anger got the better of them, that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Other cultures may have different “unlesses”.  It may be that it’s not acceptable to hit a woman…

…unless she doesn’t cook the dinner correctly. …unless she answers back. …unless she looks at another man.

Anger may not be one of their “cultural unlesses”.  In such a context an abuser may feel he can justifiably use violence without any anger.  He doesn’t need to psych himself up to pseudo anger in order to use violence.

In these cases, the Cycle of Abuse may look different.  When the rules are broken he can simply punish her immediately.

From a Western context, with our “cultural unless” of anger, we may look at other cultural contexts and view them as barbaric; but all “cultural unlesses” are barbaric for women.  Anger is never a justifiable reason for violence. If we focus on other “cultural unlesses”, while ignoring our own culture’s “unlesses”; we are hypocritical and risk fuelling racist ideas towards non-Western cultures.  We need to work towards a world where there are no “cultural unlesses”.  Where anger is never an acceptable explanation and abuse is always seen as barbaric and wrong.