It's pretty baroque to include cultural rituals/corporal punishment as a form of a abuse, as stipulations to defining something as abusive usually requires that the act be obsequious and unjust.
In order to understand this assertion (a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief), I had to look up some definitions.
Baroque refers to 17th and 18th century art, so I looked up synonyms: ornate, fancy, very elaborate, over-elaborate, curlicued, extravagant, rococo, fussy, busy, ostentatious, showy, wedding-cake, gingerbread. 'a baroque prose style'
Obsequious: subservient, servile, slavish, obsequious means showing or characterized by extreme compliance or abject obedience. Subservient implies the cringing manner of one very conscious of a subordinate position.
I definitely didn't speak in a flowery, over-elaborate way, and I definitelly wasn't being subservient, extremely compliant, nor abjectly obedient -- especially considering that I was speaking from the position that for seventeen years I had bruises from corporal punishment, and it never corrected any undesirable behaviors of mine but actually exacerbated them. It was imposed to create subservience in me. Speaking against it is the opposite.
There are laws around the world against corporal punishment for children because it causes physical harm and is therefore abusive. I recommend the online resource Project No Spank for more in-depth information about corporal punishment as a form of abuse rather than ostensible correction.
I think that the consensus' definition of abuse from an outside-looking-in perspective is something like "maltreatment/malfeasance that is entirely axiomatic (i.e., unhinged from typical moral or systemic regulations)." But you cannot codify what constitutes virtuousness or justification on the purely objective plane of reality.
The Catholic church thought they were being virtuous and just during the crusades. Perhaps better to define abuse according to the one who experiences it rather than the one in power who performs it? Abuse is about power, dominance, and submission.
Also, I apologize for making that statement; I was pretty uninformed on the prevalence of abuse up until I started researching it.
I'm glad you did.
I would like elaboration on most of your statements, especially those of which that relate to governmental abuse; physical, sexual, verbal, and mental abuse in a variety of settings; and abuse's prevalence in culture before antagonizing any of them.
Antagonize: provoke the hostility of; act in opposition to.
Should I be scared to provoke the hostility of those you'd like me to elaborate about? I'm certainly in opposition to them.
I said that I could go on an on; what I meant was that I was holding myself back from doing so, and since such information is readily available and you've shown capability in researching such things, I'll leave it in your hands. Or, if you'd like to, I suggest opening a new thread in Off Topic to start a new discussion rather than derailing this thread, which was my main reason for not going on and on (the second was because I didn't feel like writing an essay, but I gladly will in the proper context, which this thread is not). If you want a serious discussion and start a new thread, then I can respond at leisure, and others can join in to contribute to your understanding rather than putting the entire burden on me. However, if you genuinely want to understand, I hope you'll take on some of the burden and do some research yourself.
