I can understand your frustration with the situation; my mother works as a social worker placing children in foster home, and she tells me about the situations when children are returned to families where they will be unhappy because there is no sufficient grounds to take them out. it is hard to qualify when someone is mistreating their children enough to interfere, especially since interfering does mean limiting the freedom of the person; on the other hand, you sometimes really want to shake the person and say, hey, what are you doing? my other comment about cultures was because when I was teaching new immigrants from Ethiopia, who came from an agricultural region, a very traditional society, we once had a six years old misbehave - just usual six year old lack of discipline, and we punished him by sending him out for an hour and then having him region the class. his father heard he misbehaved and came in and started beating him to make him see the error of his ways - and there it was actual beating, forbidden by law - but ok under the father's cultural norms. we intervened to stop it, but I would bet many of these kids get beaten at home quite a bit - and you can't throw a whole population of immigrants in jail or take all their kids away. so what do you do? how do you fight it?