Schools in Sweden can’t be beaten: corporal punishment around the world

[Jazzy]

Sebastian Doggart examines corporal punishment in the US and elsewhere.



Britain has now banned corporal punishment in schools. But in the US, it’s still hugely popular. I’m finding it hard to make sense of this. America has banned beatings of sailors, women, and animals. How can it endorse hitting children?



Countries can be categorised in a four-tier league system, like football teams. The fourth division, the most violent, is where children can be smacked by three groups of punishers: parents, teachers, and government officials. Right at the bottom are Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose regimes impose amputation and mutilation. If we were to move to Iran, its penal code would impose adult sentences on my son when he turns 16, and on my daughter when she is only 10. Anyone caught stealing must endure the amputation of the four fingers on the right hand for the first offence, and half of the left foot for the second.



Malaysia and Singapore regularly cane offenders. Flogging of the feet, or falaka, is used by strict Islamic regimes, and was applied by Uday Hussein to punish players on the Iraqi national football team who missed a penalty or an open goal. His favoured instruments were thorn-studded whips and electric cables.



Bangladesh is seeking promotion out of the fourth division, banning the use of religious edicts, or fatwas, in July 2010. But provincial justice is defying central government. Last month, a terrible story emerged of a 14-year-old girl in the Shariatpur district. She was accused of having an affair with a married man. A local imam ignored her protests of innocence and issued a fatwa that she be lashed 101 times, in public. She died a week later.



Under pressure from the imam, doctors wrote a post-mortem saying she had no signs of injury but had perished from “convulsions due to hysteria”. Her body was exhumed to reveal that she had died from internal bleeding and wounds to her scalp, abdomen, back, chest, arm and legs. Police are now treating the case as murder.



The third division of child clobberings is where children are beaten by parents and teachers. Here we find a brace of European countries – the Czech Republic and France – as well as Australia and Iraq. This is also where the US sits.



American supporters of corporal punishment often cite the Old Testament book of Proverbs, chapter 13: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.”



According to Deborah Sendek, director of the Center for Effective Discipline, a non-profit organisation based in Ohio, this Biblical interpretation underpinned American law on the mistreatment of children for nearly a century after the country was founded.



Corporal punishment remains widespread in American schools and homes, largely because of a 1977 Supreme Court ruling, Ingraham vs Wright. The case centred on James Ingraham, a 14-year-old student in Florida, who allegedly disobeyed a teacher’s order to leave the school stage. Ingraham was held down and spanked more than 20 times with a paddle. He suffered a haematoma that left him bed-ridden for days.



Ingraham’s parents sued the school for violating the 8th Amendment that prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, and for denying his basic right of “due process.” But the Justices upheld school beatings as constitutional.



Corporal punishment retains a huge wellspring of national support. A study done in 2005 by SurveyUSA showed that 72 per cent of American parents believe “it is OK to spank a child”.



“We estimate that one in two American children are getting spanked or slapped, with a higher concentration of beatings in less educated, lower socio-economic families,” Sendek says.



As far as schools are concerned, individual states decide on whether teachers may hit students. Today, 19 out of 50 states give their blessing to corporal punishment in publicly-funded schools. Those states are marked in red on the map below:

Schools must keep a record of each beating. In 2006, the Office of Civil Rights documented 223,000 beatings in American public schools. That figure would be far higher if statistics were available for beatings in private schools, which 48 states allow.



Only two US states, New Jersey and Iowa, have outlawed beatings in state and private schools.

Full story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...ten-corporal-punishment-around-the-world.html

 

[Cranos]

What the hell? That's terrible.

 

[Evil Eye]

Really? Teachers are allowed to do that?

That's pretty messed up.