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IN INDIA, patting a child on the head is considered humiliating. In the Hmong tradition of “marriage by capture,” a girl must feign resistance when her groom carries her off to consummate their union. Turning up the sole of one’s foot is a grave insult in Thailand. Among Afghanis, kissing a young boy’s genitals is a harmless mark of paternal affection.
Who knew?
Alison Renteln JD ’91 did, and she thinks the American legal community should also get wise to such folkways. So the USC political scientist has taken it upon herself to educate them.
“People act in a way that appears in-comprehensible but makes sense when you understand their cultures and laws,” Renteln recently told a class of 31 veteran law enforcement officers.
Since 1993, she has been offering a unique four-hour class at USC’s Delinquency Control Institute, which provides continuing education courses for police officers. As one of the nation’s leading authorities on cross-cultural legal issues, Renteln also frequently speaks at law schools to raise awareness among future attorneys. She’s even pressing the state to establish a cultural competency requirement for trial and appellate judges.
“We’re all Americans, so we should pay attention to our similarities, not our differences,” she says. “But to do so ignores the very real rights of immigrants.”
RENTELN FIRST became interested in the conflict between ethnic folkways and the American legal system in 1985, when a suicidal Japanese immigrant was charged with first-degree murder after drowning her two children in Santa Monica Bay.
The mother, Renteln discovered, was actually doing what was considered the humane thing: “According to Japanese culture, it would have been more cruel to leave children behind with no one to look after them than to take them into the afterlife,” Renteln says.
Her pupils aren’t always receptive to such ideas.
“I don’t see any difference between this and claiming that you came from a bad home – it’s just an excuse,” complained an officer from the Northern California community of Hillsborough at a recent seminar.
Excuse or not, Renteln coun-ters, by inadvertently stumbling over cultural land mines, police jeopardize the trust and respect of the people they are trying to protect.
“As the country gets increasingly diverse, it’s incumbent on the justice system to become culturally competent,” says Peggy Hora, a San Jose Superior Court judge and the past dean of the California Judicial College, which trains all of the state’s new judges. “We need people like Alison to show us the way.”
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT
Mistaken Cultural Identities
CROSS-CULTURAL CLASHES can be found at the root of white-collar crimes, hunting and fishing violations, sexual harassment, kidnapping, rape, child abuse and even murder, says Alison Renteln, who has examined hundreds of such cases over the past decade. Ignorance about foreign customs can lead to errors in an investigation, unjust verdicts that tend to get overturned, wasted court time and much unnecessary suffering, Renteln says.
Take the 1994 case of three Sikh children suspended from their San Joaquin Valley elementary school for wearing kirpins – the requisite ceremonial daggers of their faith. The daggers violated a policy against carrying weapons to school, the district claimed. A federal district court upheld the suspension, but the 9th Circuit Court later overturned the decision, ordering the kids back to school with their kirpins slightly altered for safety. In the interim, the youngsters had missed nine months of school.
Lack of cultural sensitivity can also prove expensive. A group of Gypsies in Spokane, Wash., sued the city’s police department after officers conducted strip-searches on unmarried women suspected of fencing stolen property. According to Romani tradition, a girl touched below the waist by a man is considered unfit to marry, Renteln explains. The case was settled in 1997 for $1.43 million.
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