10 Barbaric Practices That Still Exist

Humanity has invented space telescopes, mRNA vaccines, and an app that can tell you whether your houseplant is “thriving” or “quietly plotting revenge.” So it’s extra wild that some practices straight out of a medieval nightmare are still happening todaysometimes in the open, sometimes in the shadows, and sometimes dressed up in respectable language like “tradition,” “discipline,” or “therapy.”

This article isn’t here to gawk. It’s here to explain what these practices are, why they persist, who they harm, and what actually helps reduce them. Because calling something “barbaric” is the easy part; understanding the mechanics is how you help end it.

1) Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C)

FGM/C involves intentionally altering or injuring female genital organs for non-medical reasons. It has no health benefits and can cause severe pain, infection, complications in childbirth, and long-term physical and psychological trauma. While it’s often framed as a cultural rite or a requirement for “purity,” it functions in practice as social control over girls’ bodies and futures.

Why it still exists

FGM/C persists because it’s tied to marriageability, community pressure, and misinformation (including myths about religion or hygiene). Families may fear social exclusion more than the immediate harmespecially where legal enforcement is weak or communities distrust authorities. Even in places where it’s illegal, it can continue underground or during travel.

What helps

The most effective approaches combine survivor-centered healthcare, confidential support, community-led education, and enforcement that targets organizersnot survivors. Public health messaging works best when it is culturally literate and led by trusted voices inside affected communities.

2) Child Marriage (Including Legal Loopholes in the U.S.)

Child marriage is marriage involving someone under 18. Globally, it’s often linked to poverty, conflict, and gender inequality. But it’s not “over there” only: legal exceptions in parts of the United States can still allow minors to marry with parental consent, judicial approval, or other loopholes. That can trap teensespecially girlsin relationships with huge power imbalances.

Why it still exists

The drivers are painfully practical: families trying to “solve” pregnancy, reduce financial burden, or avoid scandal; communities treating girls as dependents to be transferred; and laws that prioritize parental rights over the child’s long-term safety. Once married, minors may face barriers to leaving: limited access to shelters, complicated divorce rules, and fewer protections that single minors would otherwise have.

What helps

Raising the minimum marriage age to 18 without exceptions, plus making it easier for at-risk teens to access services (housing, legal aid, education) are the most direct fixes. Prevention also means strengthening child welfare responses and expanding economic supports that reduce “marriage as bailout.”

3) Debt Bondage and Forced Labor

Forced labor happens when people are compelled to work through force, fraud, or coercion. Debt bondage is one of the most common patterns: a recruiter or employer traps someone with “fees” (for travel, housing, food, paperwork) that never stop growing, then uses the “debt” as leverage. The work might look ordinary from the outsideagriculture, construction, domestic work, factoriesbut the lack of freedom is the giveaway.

Why it still exists

It thrives in the gap between what goods “should” cost and what the market demands. When a supply chain rewards the cheapest option, someone somewhere gets squeezed. Add immigration vulnerability, language barriers, fear of authorities, and isolation from family, and you get a perfect storm for coercion.

What helps

Strong labor inspections, safe reporting pathways, and real consequences for traffickers and companies that profit from exploitation. Consumers can’t “boycott” their way out of modern slavery, but they can support transparency laws, ethical procurement, and organizations that provide survivor services.

4) Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is the exploitation of a person for commercial sex using force, fraud, or coercion. When a minor is involved, many legal frameworks treat it as trafficking regardless of “consent,” because children cannot consent to commercial sexual exploitation. This abuse can show up as grooming online, coercion by intimate partners, control by organized networks, or “survival sex” driven by homelessness and instability.

Why it still exists

Demand, profit, and vulnerability. Traffickers target what society neglects: runaway youth, kids in unstable housing, people with past abuse, undocumented workers, and anyone isolated enough that threats work. Technology makes recruitment faster, but the underlying engine is still power and money.

What helps

Treating exploited people as victimsnot criminalsplus stable housing, trauma-informed services, and specialized law enforcement focused on traffickers. Prevention also means addressing the pipeline factors: youth homelessness, abuse, foster system instability, and lack of accessible mental health care.

5) Honor-Based Violence (Including “Honor Killings”)

Honor-based violence is abuse committed to enforce perceived family or community “honor.” It can include threats, surveillance, forced marriage, physical assault, and sometimes homicide. The “honor” framing is a lie: the real goal is controlespecially over women’s autonomy, relationships, sexuality, and gender expression.

Why it still exists

Because secrecy protects it. Victims may face pressure from extended family, fear of retaliation, or social isolation if they seek help. Systems can miss warning signs when abuse is mislabeled as “just a family issue,” or when professionals worry about appearing culturally insensitive.

What helps

Training for educators, healthcare workers, and law enforcement to recognize risk patterns (coercion, threats around dating or “disobedience,” escalating surveillance). Safety planning must assume multiple potential perpetratorsnot just a single abuserand prioritize confidential support.

6) Acid Attacks (Acid Violence)

Acid attacks involve throwing or pouring corrosive substances on a person with the intent to disfigure, torture, or intimidate. Survivors can face lifelong medical complications, scarring, vision loss, and deep psychological trauma. These attacks are often rooted in misogyny, “rejection rage,” disputes over marriage, or attempts to punish someone for asserting independence.

Why it still exists

In places where corrosive chemicals are cheap and easily accessible, and where prosecution is slow or inconsistent, attackers calculate that fear will outlast consequences. Social stigma can also isolate survivors, making it harder to access care, employment, and justice.

What helps

Regulation of corrosive substances, fast emergency burn care, long-term reconstructive and psychological services, and legal reforms that ensure serious, enforceable penalties. Survivor-led advocacy is especially powerful here, because it turns stigma into political momentum.

7) “Conversion Therapy” (Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Change Efforts)

“Conversion therapy” is a catch-all term for efforts that claim they can change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Major medical and mental health organizations have repeatedly rejected these practices as ineffective and potentially harmful. The harm can include anxiety, depression, shame, trauma responses, and increased risk of self-harmespecially in youth forced into it by family pressure.

Why it still exists

Because it can hide behind the aesthetics of help: offices, counselors, “treatment plans,” and the comforting lie that pain equals progress. In some cases it’s also wrapped in religious language, which makes victims feel like refusing is refusing their family, community, or faith.

What helps

Bans on the practice for minors, professional accountability, and easy access to affirming mental health care. Families also need education: support for an LGBTQ kid is protective; rejection is a risk factor.

8) Prolonged Solitary Confinement

Solitary confinementoften called “restrictive housing” or “segregation”isolates a person for 22+ hours a day with minimal human contact. Research and medical organizations have linked prolonged isolation to serious harms: anxiety, hallucinations, worsening mental illness, increased self-harm risk, and long-term physical and psychological damage. The cruelty isn’t just the locked door; it’s the prolonged sensory starvation.

Why it still exists

It’s frequently used as a management shortcut in overcrowded, under-resourced facilities, and sometimes as punishment. Because the public can’t see it, it’s easier to ignore. And because many people held in solitary are already marginalized, their suffering gets discounted.

What helps

Strict time limits, independent oversight, mental health alternatives, and excluding vulnerable populations (youth, pregnant people, people with serious mental illness). Transparency matters, too: data reporting makes it harder for abuse to hide in administrative vocabulary.

9) Corporal Punishment of Children in Schools

Yes, in 2026, some U.S. students can still be legally hit by school staff as “discipline,” often via paddling. Corporal punishment is associated with increased behavioral problems over time, and it disproportionately affects certain groupsraising equity and child-safety concerns. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see the logic problem: teaching kids that violence solves problems is… a bold educational philosophy.

Why it still exists

Tradition, local politics, and a “my parents got spanked and I turned out fine” narrative that ignores the kids who didn’t turn out fineor didn’t turn out at all. Schools under stress may lean on quick compliance tools instead of investing in trauma-informed supports.

What helps

State bans, clear district policies, parent and student rights awareness, and discipline models that prioritize de-escalation and restorative practices. Effective behavior support isn’t soft; it’s strategic.

10) Judicial Corporal Punishment (Public Caning, Flogging, and Stoning)

In some legal systems, the state still physically punishes bodies to “correct” behaviorthrough public caning, flogging, or even stoning. These punishments are often applied to so-called “morality” offenses, including consensual sexual behavior, and can be inflicted in public as a spectacle. Even when presented as “law and order,” the effect is intimidationand the impact can be permanent physical injury and trauma.

Why it still exists

Because public punishment is politically useful. It signals control, enforces social hierarchies, and shifts public frustration onto easy targets. It also persists when legal systems lack safeguards and when certain groups (women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities, the poor) are singled out.

What helps

International pressure, local human rights advocacy, legal reform, and documentation. Visibility is protective: abuses are harder to defend when the world can see them clearly, and when survivors and lawyers can tell the truth without retaliation.

So… Why Are These Still Here?

Because progress isn’t a straight lineit’s a tug-of-war. Harmful practices persist when the people harmed have less power than the people benefiting. They persist when fear outweighs trust, when institutions are weak, and when “that’s just how it is” is treated like a law of physics instead of a habit humans can unlearn.

The good news: these practices are not inevitable. Across the world, survivors, clinicians, educators, lawyers, journalists, and community leaders are shrinking the space where cruelty can hide. Change is slow, but it is realand it accelerates when more people understand what they’re looking at.

Experiences That Stick With You (Without Turning Pain Into Spectacle)

If you spend time reading survivor testimonies, public health reports, court filings, or investigative journalism on barbaric practices that still exist, a few patterns repeat so reliably they start to feel like a map.

First is the language trick: harm gets renamed until it sounds normal. A child marriage becomes “family stability.” Solitary confinement becomes “administrative segregation.” Conversion therapy becomes “counseling.” Corporal punishment becomes “discipline.” The vocabulary isn’t accidentalit’s a shield. Once you notice it, you start seeing how often cruelty borrows a suit and tie, walks into the room, and introduces itself as “common sense.”

Second is the quiet logistics of control. Survivors often describe not one dramatic moment but a thousand tiny constraints: who they can text, where they can go, whether they have documents, whether they can keep money, whether they’re allowed to be alone with a doctor. Trafficking survivors talk about debt that never shrinks. People targeted by honor-based abuse talk about being watched by multiple relatives, not just one person. Students subjected to harsh discipline often describe the dread of unpredictabilitynever knowing what will set an adult off today. The harm isn’t only the act; it’s the constant background threat.

Third is the aftershock: how long “after” lasts. Acid violence survivors describe rebuilding their relationship with mirrors and public spaces. People who endured prolonged isolation describe their minds reacting to ordinary noise like it’s an emergency. Survivors of FGM/C describe healthcare experiences shaped by fear of being judged or misunderstood. LGBTQ people who went through conversion efforts often describe the same haunting message echoing for years: “I’m a problem that needs fixing.” The trauma doesn’t clock out just because a law changed or a sentence ended.

Fourth is the surprising role of ordinary bystanders. Many cases persist because someone nearby doesn’t recognize the warning signsor assumes it’s none of their business. A teacher sees a kid repeatedly “disappearing” for days and doesn’t ask why. A clinician hears a request for a “virginity check” and doesn’t challenge the myth. A neighbor hears screaming and decides it’s “family stuff.” One of the most common experiences in this field is realizing that prevention is often less about superhero interventions and more about competent, compassionate adults doing the next right thing at the right time.

Finally, there’s the antidote experience: what it feels like when systems work. A survivor gets a trauma-informed medical visit where nobody flinches or judges. A hotline advocate connects someone to a safe shelter. A school replaces punitive practices with real behavioral supports and injuries drop. A state closes a child-marriage loophole and suddenly judges can’t “approve” away a child’s future. These aren’t viral moments, but they’re the ones that change trajectoriesand they’re why learning about these issues isn’t just depressing. It’s also practical.