In Islam…we have rights over one another. Parents have rights over their children as children have rights over parents. Your spouse has rights over you as well. But at the same time…Islam holds YOU accountable for your sins. That’s why Islam doesn’t support the concept of “original sin” or the idea of someone dying for your sins. You are held accountable for every atom of good you do and every atom of evil you do, but at the same time Allah’s merciful. Also, if we commit a sin against Allah…we repent to Him. But if you we wrong a fellow human being…we’re supposed to seek forgiveness from them first, I believe. That sounds fair to me.
If you commit a mistake out of SHEER ignorance…then you’re not held accountable. But whether or not you truly were ignorant, Allah knows best. It’s hard for me to believe that someone could get away with abuse saying that it was done out of ignorance due to upbringing. Even if you try to justify something that’s wrong to yourself…deep down inside you feel restless. That’s your conscience’s way of telling you that you’re not entirely at peace with what you did. I would think that AT SOME POINT in his life…maybe during childhood…the abuser should have felt the pain of being abused…to know that it’s wrong to repeat it. But it could very well be that the individual has been conditioned to believe that it’s right or has become almost immune to it. Even then…living in the age of information…where you learn about abuse through various forms of the media…it’s almost hard to believe that the abuser doesn’t feel some shame over it. It could just be that they’ve accepted such practice as a personal “norm”.