Stop Corporal Punishment in American Public Schools

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Permalink Reply by Dorothy Sacks on April 28, 2012 at 10:15am

I have been studying this issue for a long time.  We need to get parents to understand that spanking is ineffective and that there are other ways to discipline children.  Unfortunately, there are still many parents who believe that youth today is out of control and that this is because the children are not spanked.  Of course, this is not true.  First, of course, youth is not out of control, but where there is more youth crime, it is usually in the states where most parents do spank and where the schools allow corporal punishment, not in the states where there is less spanking.

Variables are difficult to control for so you cannot assume causality, but the correlation is there.

Note that in Sweden, the spanking ban never had any criminal penalties *and* it took quite some time for the ban to be effective and for parents to learn new ways to discipline.  

Interesting article here:

http://www.neverhitachild.org/haeuser.html

It is also true that the people who oppose the spanking ban, attempt to show that Swedish children are more criminal, which is totally untrue.  Interestingly, it is immigrant children who tend to be more criminal and immigrant parents are more likely to use corporal punishment than native Swedes.

It is very difficult to find statistics on what has happened since the ban, but here is one article

http://adc.bmj.com/content/83/3/196.full

In relation to the behaviour of Swedish youth, in contrast to the experience of most other industrialised countries, Durrant's figures show that since the anti-smacking ban, rates of theft, drug, or alcohol use, and suicide for teenagers and young adults have declined in Sweden, as have most offences. The one exception, a rise in reported youth on youth assaults, is thought to be the result of an increasing cultural rejection of violence with a concomitant increase in enforcement. Other work has shown no evidence of an increase in actual assaults.

Good luck in getting corporal punishment banned. It will not be easy.

Permalink Reply by Earther on May 4, 2012 at 6:35pm

Thank you for your expertise in this area of study.  I have not been able to read over your articles linked but I do plan to.  I recently saw the movie "Bully" and I do reccomend it to anyone who comes in contact with children.  It is painful to watch though.  I have recently been thinking about how the cultural acceptance of violence has influenced ignorance by protecting violence.  Recently there has been two professional football players commit suicide because of brain trauma.  How many parents will choose to pull there children out of football to protect there brains?