A Culture of Violence?

This post is by Miriam Vaswani as part of the series ‘Culture and Human Rights: Challenging Cultural Excuses for Gender-Based Violence’ hosted by Gender Across Borders and Violence Is Not Our Culture.

When I started working in social services in Glasgow, a colleague who had grown up on a notoriously deprived and violent council estate explained the cultural fact of birth control in her neighbourhood.

“Nobody uses it, she said. Boys won’t sleep with girls who use it, because they want to get girls pregnant. Girls won’t use it because boys don’t want them to, their father’s won’t let them.”

Nobody, she went on to explain, had abortions. Not that she knew of, anyway. Fathers wouldn’t allow their daughters to have one. She’d only known of one girl who had an abortion, and in that case her father had allowed it because the father of the baby was not white.

“Look,” she said. “It’s just the culture around here.”

Women in Scotland have the legal right to choose but they are barred from choosing because of what I often heard described as ‘culture’.  It took me some time to grasp this. It was not just because I was a Canadian moving to a different country, but also because the ‘culture’ was so different in comparison with the cultural practices of the Glaswegians in my social circle.

Socially, free decisive women and pleasant sensitive men surrounded me. In my time in Glasgow, I was never involved with a man who interfered with my right to birth control. Professionally, working in areas of Glasgow so steeped in poverty and violence they were unrecognizable as the same city, it was a different story for a different surrounding.

Condoms were almost never used, frequent childbirth was regarded as an inevitable consequence of life; domestic abuse was spoken of casually. When I attempted to question these practices or present my women clients with their rights and options, I was met with resignation and sometimes anger.

“You don’t understand,” I was repeatedly told. “This isn’t your culture”

I got sick of it, frankly, because it wasn’t a cultural issue, from my perspective. Culture involves a consensus of a whole community. If the women of a community aren’t free to make choices, sexual safety and birth control being paramount, then what we’re left with is a stifling of culture. A practice imposed by one segment of a community on another, masquerading as tradition.

Tragically, the same attitude prevailed amongst many of my colleagues. When I spoke with women clients about their rights, I was accused of being unrealistic, of imposing middle class values on working class people.

Shortly after a change of legislation allowing police to arrest a suspect of domestic abuse without having to rely on a victim statement, I contacted the local police to report clear signs of domestic abuse of one of my clients. When I spoke with a colleague about this, she told me not to bother.

“They’ll just say it’s a domestic thing. They won’t get involved.”

“They have to,” I said. “It’s their job.”

“I know the law is meant to have changed but it’s the culture around here. You can’t change culture that quickly,” said my colleague.

Fortunately the police responded and took the situation seriously. But my colleague’s attitude was disturbing, and brought to mind the resigned way culture was batted around as an excuse for almost anything: sectarianism, casual racism, gender discrimination, homophobia, violence and particularly violence against women.

My own small battle to respect the country I’d adopted while recognising the difference between culture and habitual violence was, to say the least, an uphill one. There were times I gave up earlier than I should have, or allowed complacency to deter me from promoting sexual health and safety more fiercely. On one occasion when I attempted to forge closer links with domestic abuse agencies in the city, I was reprimanded for wasting time.

There were some hopeful changes. I saw a notable improvement in the way police handled domestic abuse cases, thanks in part to the new legislation and government policy. I saw several women make increasingly brave choices about their lives, including the long battle of disentangling themselves from violent partners.

In all these situations, I heard no complaints about damaged culture.

About the author

Miriam Vaswani contributes to several online journals and magazines, and writes an annual column about the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She worked in 3rd sector housing and homelessness in Scotland for much of her career with a specialisation in abuse prevention legislation, then retrained as a teacher and lived in Russia for two years. She was raised in Canada, near the Atlantic coast. You can follow her on twitter as @miriamvaswani and her blog is http://miriam-littlebones.blogspot.com 

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