Culture and Public Support for Violence Against Children in Six Nations of South Asia and Europe

The contemporary scholarship views violence against children as a violation of children’s rights and calls for adjusting these concerns into social policy designs. Yet violence against children remains highly disproportionally distributed, with developed countries showing less support for violence compared to their developed counterparts. Building on Ingelhart’s typology of secular-traditional and postmodern values, this study examines the role of culture in explaining violence against children in six South Asian (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) and European (Germany, Belgium, and Sweden) nations. Empirical evidence provides mixed support to the theoretical demonstrations that the beholders of secular and postmaterial values would denounce violence against children, and this relationship would be more pronounced in European than South Asian contexts. This study found that as almost equal proportions of South Asians support violence against children, such support is fairly low in European countries. Further analyses within the two societies showed that the spillover effects of secular values orientations are more complicated than they appear at the face; nevertheless, the effect of postmodern values are in expected directions.