Here is what I’ve learned from my research and my life: healing and transforming our world requires particular attention to gender and parent-child relations. This is because people first learn to respect the rights and dignity of others, or to accept violence, cruelty, oppression, and discrimination as “just the way things are,” through what they experience and observe in these foundational relations.
Despotic and violent cultures recognize this—although many people who think of themselves as progressives still fail to do so. For example, for the despotic and violent Nazis, a priority was pushing women back to their “traditional place” in a “traditional family”—code words for a rigidly male-dominated family where children learn it’s very painful not to obey orders, no matter how unjust. We see this same priority in violent and despotic religious “fundamentalist” cultures or subcultures—be they Eastern or Western, Muslim or Christian—where “deserved” violence against women...
