In a new interview for Azda TV, FFE Chairwoman Leila Seiitbek addresses why corporal punishment of children remains widespread across Tajikistan and Central Asia more broadly — despite a 2024 law formally banning the practice.
The 56% figure cited for Tajikistan is striking, but far from unique to the country: Uzbekistan (62%) and Kazakhstan (53%) show comparable rates, and the real prevalence across the region is likely even higher, since many cases go unreported. This reflects a regional norm rooted in a history where physical punishment was treated as a normal part of child-rearing rather than as violence. The FFE Chairwoman notes that Tajikistan’s 2024 ban is a step in the right direction on paper, but legislation of this kind is frequently adopted to satisfy reporting obligations to international partners, while the harder work — public education, changing social attitudes, building support systems — goes largely unfunded and undone.
She also points to structural drivers behind the problem: mass labor migration to Russia leaves many children in the care of relatives without full-time parental oversight or emotional support, while poverty and chronic economic stress push aggression onto the most vulnerable members of the household. Meanwhile, family-support infrastructure — psychological services, non-violent parenting programs — is nearly absent, and the civil-society organizations that might otherwise fill that gap operate under serious pressure, with dozens forced to shut down in recent years.
Addressing the viral video of a beating triggered by a dispute over water, the FFE Chairwoman notes she has seen the footage and is watching the announced investigation, while expressing skepticism given the track record of Tajik law enforcement. She places the incident in a broader context: water scarcity — worsened by climate change, mismanagement, corruption, and aging irrigation infrastructure — is a longstanding source of both domestic and cross-border tension in Central Asia, visible for years in periodic clashes along the Kyrgyz-Tajik border. But scarcity does not create violence on its own; it acts as a trigger layered on top of an existing culture in which force is the normalized way of resolving conflict.
Zooming out, the FFE Chairwoman argues that this pattern extends across the region: legal reform is outpacing the cultural shift needed to make it meaningful, particularly where authoritarian governance — power built on force rather than accountability — is mirrored inside the family itself. A hierarchy in which the elder is entitled to use force against the younger, and dissent is not tolerated, operates simultaneously at the level of the state and the household, which is why the two are so difficult to change in isolation.
Watch the full interview on AZDA TV: