Thanks to Eliza for the first hand account of your experiences within Africa and with African culture. I think you've made some exceedingly valuable contributions to this thread. However I would personally think it a serious omission not to consider BOTH the contributions of extremist Christian religious dogma AND West African immigrant cultural belief and practice in these cases of child abuse. To say "all child abuse is the same" is false. All child abuse is obviously deplorable, whatever culture/class/ethnicity such abuse occurs in (including of course atheist white middle-class homes), yet to dismiss out of hand as somehow irrelevant, the cultural, ethnic and religious contexts which give rise to distinct groups of cases, is to diminish our understanding of such cases which inevitably results in a diminished ability to intervene effectively in order to prevent future examples of the same.