[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]
Posts II, III, and IV in this series have dealt with the differences between Arab child rearing of boys versus the treatment of girls. The disparity is striking and has repercussions on the development of the sense of self and self worth that is a primary developmental aspect of early childhood. There are two extremely important considerations that require incorporation in the explanation of character development of the Arab Mind. The first, pervasive corporal punishment often merging into overt physical abuse and overt sexual abuse, I will address today and the second, the meaning, timing, and experience of circumcision, will be the topic of the next post in this series.
Corporal punishment, physical abuse, and sexual abuse of children are impossible to quantify in the Arab world but the culture and religion expressly permit and sanction behavior that in the West would be easily recognized as abuse and the extant evidence suggests the problem is pervasive and deep rooted. Patai sets the scene: (pp. 35-36)
... about this time (the fourth year, more or less), the father begins to pay more attention to his son and the boy's gradual easing over from the women's to the men's world begins. This paternal attention is, from the boy's point of view, a mixed blessing. The father, much as he may love his son, is required by t he folk mores to develop the boy's character, and the methods of fatherly socialization are often harsh. As long as he was under the exclusive tutelage of his mother, or a female mother-substitute such as an older sister, aunt, or grandmother, the boy could in general have his way. ... The men's world, as represented by the father is very different. Here, the boy is suddenly confronted by standards. While his own wishes are disregarded more often than not, he has to learn to fulfill his father's wishes, to obey his commands, to serve him and even to be subservient to him.
This change in status is not an easy one to get used to, and it takes a long time, years in fact, for the new role of a young (for a while the youngest) male child in the men's world to become internalized. In the meantime clashes occur, and with them comes the bitter taste of the father's heavy hand, the rod, the strap, and, at least among the most tradition-bound Bedouin tribes, the saber and the dagger whose cut or stab is supposed, beyond punishing the disobedient son, to harden him for his future life. [Emphasis mine-SW]
...
Soon after learning his place in relation to his father, the young boy child finds out that, in contrast to the women's world in which both older and younger females, irrespective of age, are supposed to do his bidding (within limits, of course), in the men's world age differences are of the utmost importance. He learns who his other superiors are, in addition to his father: all men older than he, including even a brother or a cousin who is his senior by only a year or so. On the other hand, he learns he can treat boys younger than he as inferiors, although not quite as inferior as women, but still as persons of lesser importance than he. Once he has learned these lessons, and assuming that he has learned them well, the boy will have assumed the typical male Arab personality.
The penultimate line comprises a description of the cultural embodiment of a classic defense mechanism known as "identification with the aggressor." It facilities externalization and scapegoating, familiar and damaging aspects of the Arab character that are ubiquitous.
Although as suggested, statistics are hard to come by, the evidence of abuse can be intuited in a few ways. First of all, reports leak out of the Arab states with regularity of abusive behavior toward children. Those countries that declare themselves more faithful to Sharia law promulgate overtly abusive and cruel punishments for transgressions that in the West would be unnoticed. Caning, a gruesome form of punishment, remains common in Saudi Arabia, and stonings occur in Iran and other countries that adhere to Sharia. Honor killing, as well, has slowly emerged from the shadows in Arab communities and countries. Violence is inherent in the current versions of Sharia law and learned scholars discuss, for example, the proper way to beat one's wife for various transgressions.
The most problematic form of violence is child abuse, which includes sexual as well as physical abuse. According to Sharia, girls as young as 12-15 can be legally married (without their consent)and are essentially raped by the husband, often decades older, who expects obedience and enforces obedience with vigor. It is more difficult to ascertain levels of sexual exploitation of children but the reports that do surface from time to time suggest the problem is significant.
The key factor that differentiates Arab child abuse from the type that is ubiquitous in all societies is that violent and cruel treatment of those who are in a dependent condition is culturally sanctioned under the current interpretations of Sharia law that prevail in such disparate Muslim nations as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, sections of Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories.
There is a terrible psychic cost that accrues with child abuse. An abused child is a traumatized child. The traumatic situation, with its mix of terror, rage, passivity, pain, and confusion, is impossible for the child to fully grasp and incorporate. The distance between the needed parent and the hated parent is impossible to bridge. The child dissociates during the traumatic experience and ultimately splits off part of the object. I described some of the effects of such abuse on the developing ego in PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part I:
Even worse for the child's development is when the parent is overtly neglectful or abusive. In these cases, the child develops severe defects in their character, referred to as "vertical splits in the ego" by Leonard Shengold, MD, who has written extensively about the developmental problems seen in survivors of child abuse (see Soul Murder and Soul Murder Revisited : Thoughts about Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory). In a person whose ego has been damaged by abuse they retain aspects, split off parts, of the ego which are developmentally delayed. This person can work, function as if they are an adult in most or many spheres of life, but in their closest relationships are unable to adequately perceive and evaluate the reality of another person's basic character, especially their flaws.
In the typical case of parental child abuse, the abuse is traumatic in and of itself, but is given a special resonance by virtue of the perpetrator being one of the people the child most loves, trusts, and depends on. For an abused child, they are handed an impossible developmental task: The person they need so much has caused them terrible pain and distress. In the case of overt sexual abuse, it is even worse because of the violation of the child's bodily integrity. (It is common to see in survivors of childhood sexual abuse, ongoing fantasies of horrible internal objects/introjects, which are constantly threatening to emerge and attack them and people they love; sometimes this is "normalized" into fear of illness, genetic disorders, cancer lurking within.) Further, the abuser is often contrite (and often was intoxicated at the time of the transgression); the abuser will bind the child to maintaining their "special" secret, tell the child it was all the child's fault or the outgrowth of the abuser's great love for the child, or act as if the abuse never happened. In all these situations, the child can not, no matter how intelligent and how hard he struggles, make sense out of a reality which calls love hate and hate love. The only way to understand how the loved one could hurt them so much is to imagine that they did something wrong (often a minor transgression or an imagined transgression) and deserve or provoked the punishment or abuse. The adult who survives such abuse will tend to have difficulties in recognizing danger signs in new relationships. Many abused adult women will minimize their abuse by saying that their boyfriend or husband hit them because they love them so much. Furthermore, during the inter-abuse interval, the abuse is excused and/or seen as an aberration, most often caused by some mistake that the victim has done. "He really loves me but when he drinks he gets angry." or "He really loves me and works hard and I should have had dinner on the table the way he likes." Notice how the structure of these reactions is parallel to the child who can only explain the abuse by imagining he provoked it or "daddy didn't really mean it."
The abused child grows up to be an adult who in specific circumstances has a defect in their sense of reality.
The Arab child, to preserve his safety and protect himself from further trauma, must accept the authority of the father and later father surrogates. The alternative is dangerously destabilizing to the fragile internal mental constitution. This predisposes the young person, as they grow up, to look for authority figures in whom to place their trust and thus engender a feeling of safety. Imams, who represent the highest levels of authority in Arab culture, are then in unique positions to control and direct their followers. Radical Imams, who profess extreme views with the certainty that inheres to extremism, use this dependency to ill effect. However, even those who do not fall into the orbit of the extremists have a great tendency to support and appeal to authority. Freedom can be particularly frightening because it can unconsciously evoke the danger of rebellious thoughts and feelings which are inseparable from the traumatic response that they provoked during childhood.
Before leaving the topic of childhood development, there remains one very significant area that should be explored, that of the practice of circumcision. It is a deeply meaningful rite and one that tends to accentuate many of the most problematic aspects of Arab culture as reflected int he Arab Mind.
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