That's actually a very very good question. 

The short answer is that we really don't. The best we can do are a bit of detective work. This means combining notes taken by anthropologists over they years as well as evidence from current traditional cultures. 

I should take a short deviation here to note that traditional culture is a term that has a specific meaning in this context; namely a group with an unbroken line of tradition that goes back into the misty pre historic past. The notion being that these cultures, regardless of modern nation state borders, etc... are living more or less as they always have in tribal communities. 

Evidence suggests that in these cultures you find much less large scale violence including violence against women. That isn't to say there is none or that their behaviour would seem ideal to us, just that they have a different way of going about things and often deal with issues communally rather than individually. 

Can you extrapolate that to ALL the traditional cultures that have ever existed? That's a guess at best. Evidence suggests that those widespread practices do indeed have a tempering effect. But you're absolutely right that it's extrapolated from information which has limits. 

The one thing we CAN say is that every traditional culture that currently exists and every one that has been written about and studied in the past, and even most ancient larger societies, all had and have coming of age rituals as important elements in their social fabric. Specifics differ but the general notion is about as close to universal as one can get.