The kastom defense is undermined because the practice arrived with colonial mission schools

Evidence

Across the Pacific, the concept of kastom (custom, tradition) carries significant political and social weight. In Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, defenders of corporal correction have invoked kastom — arguing, as the “African values” defence Episode 65 documented for the African context, that corporal correction is part of Pacific cultural heritage. The Pacific children’s-rights scholars and advocates — including the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, the Samoa Victim Support Group, and the broader Pacific Women’s Network Against Violence Against Women — have challenged this defence with the same argument the African decolonial recovery advanced: the practice being defended as kastom was imported with the colonial-mission apparatus, not inherited from the pre-contact Pacific child-veneration baseline. — , The Rod and the Child, 5376

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘African values’ defense from earlier in this series and the broader decolonial argument that ‘traditional’ practices are often colonial imports.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the label ‘traditional’ gets weaponized to defend practices that were actually imposed by colonizers — a pattern spanning Pacific kastom and African values defenses.

Related

• Pacific high corpora-punishment rates reflect colonial-mission transmission, not Indigenous practice (similarity 0.79)
• Defenders reframed a colonial-inherited practice as indigenous African heritage (similarity 0.79)