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February 1st 07, 06:43 PM
http://www.law.emory.edu/cslr/pressreleases/Editorialsparetherod.htm
Release date: October 6, 2004
Contact: Elaine Justice, 404-727-0643, or April
Bogle,404-712-8713
ATLANTA – OCTOBER 6, 2004 – Despite an overall decline in the duration,
frequency and severity of corporal punishment during the past 40 years,
nearly all toddlers – regardless of religious faith or ethnicity -- are
spanked by their parents an average of three times per week., according
to Murray A. Straus, professor of sociology and co-director of the
Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.
Straus shared highlights of his more than three decades of research at
the Family Forum Series event, “Spare the Rod? Legal and Religious
Challenges in Raising Children of the Book,” Oct. 6, at Emory Law
School. The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion (CISR)
hosted the event.
Monica Kaufman, WSB-TV anchor, opened the event with a personal
perspective on corporal punishment, based on her childhood, her role as
a mother, and her work as a reporter covering child abuse cases. “I
don’t understand why you have to study to get a driver’s license, but
anyone can have a child,” she said.
Straus pointed out that approximately 55 percent of parents in 1999
agreed “it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard
spanking,” down from nearly 95 percent of parents in 1968. In addition,
parents now stop spanking earlier – 55 percent were hitting
13-year-old-children, versus 35 percent in 1995 who spanked children of
this age. Severity has decreased – there is a decline in the use of
belts, hairbrushes and paddles, and the number of times per day, week or
month also has declined.
Yet prevalence of spanking has remained high: nearly all children have
been spanked in their lives because 94 percent of parents spank toddlers.
Straus’ research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health,
includes children from birth to age 17 from some 20 countries.
Spanking remains prevalent even though research shows it is not more
effective in correcting behavior than other methods and over the
long-term and has harmful side effects. Children ages two and three
repeat their misbehavior within 5.5 hours of receiving corporal
punishment, versus 9.5 hours if they were disciplined with reasoning
only. One-year-olds who receive corporal punishment from their mothers
are compliant just over 50 percent of the time, versus a nearly 70
percent compliance rate from children who little or no corporal punishment.
“If you compare the effectiveness of corporal and non-corporal
punishment, they both are highly effective immediately after being
administered and both have a low-level of effectiveness after a few
hours or days of being administered. But over the long-term of months
and years, corporal punishment tends to make behavior worse and has
harmful side effects, such as increasing the probability of delinquency
as a child and depression as an adult , while non-corporal punishment is
more effective and has beneficial side effects,” said Straus.
He points out that there is a direct correlation between the frequency
of spanking and an increase in anti-social behavior in the two years
after the year in which the spanking occurred. For example,
Euro-American children ages six through nine who were spanked three
times per week showed an increase of more than 15 percent in anti social
behavior versus a decrease in antisocial behavior for those children not
spanked. Minority children who were spanked showed an increase in
approximately 12 percent in anti-social behavior in the two years after
the year spanking was measured.
A main focus of Straus’s talk was on the benefits of not spanking. He
presented research results showing that children who are not spanked are
less likely to:
* hit other children
* hit their parents
* become juvenile delinquents
* become criminal adults
* use domestic violence
* abuse children
Straus also shows that children who are not spanked have fewer social
and psychological problems, such as depression, drug use and suicide.
“What would a world be like without spanking?” Straus asked “Comparing
adults who were not spanked with those who received a high level of
corporal punishment, the not spanked were 47 percent more likely to
graduate from college, 46 percent were less likely to be seriously
depressed, 68 percent were less likely to hit their spouse, and 67
percent were less likely to physically abuse their own children.”
Religious and legal scholars commented on Straus’ findings at the
conclusion of his remarks. Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, Emory professor of
law, explained that the Jewish tradition accepts corporal punishment
with specific guidelines. “The duty of parents in the Jewish tradition
is to prepare their children for adulthood. Hitting is an acceptable
form of discipline for parents to use with their own children if the
child has not yet reached adolescence, if the situation requires the
teaching of a lesson, and if the parent objectively decides that this
form of discipline will provide that lesson.”
Broyde added that he feels it is wrong to rely on statistics alone when
determining the value of corporal punishment. “Each situation has its
own reality – it is child specific and adult specific,” he said.
The Reverend Dr. John Westerhoff, an Episcopal priest and
theologian-in-residence at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta,
espoused his understanding of the Christian perspective on corporal
punishment. First, he pointed out, the origin of the word “discipline”
derives from the Latin verb dicere, which means “to learn.”
“The first and primary role of parents in the discipline of their
children is that of role models…how we discipline ourselves and our
children needs to be consistent with the character traits of God, such
as God gives us what we need not deserve, God's justice is for
reconciliation not retribution,” he said, adding, “Discipline must not
be confused with punishment: discipline is positive, while punishment is
negative.”
Since anger, aggression and violence are among the most frequent
side-effects of punishment, Westerhoff recommends instead setting
appropriate boundaries for children. “Children need reasonable,
consistent limits that they participate in shaping, limits that are
modeled by their parents rather than shaped by rewards and punishment
for compliance,” he said. “They also need to be affirmed and loved as
persons of dignity as they learn to be disciplined disciples.”
Plemon T. El-Amin, Masjid Imam of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam,
offered the Islamic perspective on corporal punishment. First and
foremost, he pointed out, “A child is a trust from God who doesn’t
belong to parents, he comes through parents, and therefore we should
treat him as a property of God in a most sacred way.”
Within this spirit of compassion and caring, El-Amin explained that
Islam sanctions three ways to correct children’s behavior: first,
admonish verbally; second, isolate or restrict; third, use corporal
correction that does not bruise or scar and is given with intent to
remedy or help.
“When my grandparents said to me, ‘This hurts me more than it’s going to
hurt you,’ they really meant it,” El-Amin said, adding that he knew his
grandmother’s spankings were not conducted out of anger. “She would make
an appointment for me to come by her house on Saturday for my spanking.
I knew her love was great. Parents need to ask themselves if they are
correcting behavior because the child is bothering them, or because if
they don’t, this behavior is going to become a problem for the child.”
He further explained that in the Koran, the word for striking physically
is also used for striking the intellect or the soul. “The best method of
discipline is to strike the soul, or the consciousness of the child.”
Trenny Stovall, director of the Dekalb County Child Advocacy Center,
offered her legal perspective on the issue by explaining that the State
of Georgia allows corporal punishment, but that children are to be
protected from excessive or unreasonable physical injury by the Cruelty
to Children Act and the Family Violence Act. These protections prove
challenging because they can be very broadly defined in court, she said,
but even more inconsistent is the application of protection to children
who live in diverse communities. “Many of our residents come from
countries where things such as mutilation of girls, hot coins being
placed on skin, and binding children so they won’t eat after a certain
time, are cultural norms. We try to explain that in the United States,
this is excessive and unacceptable. We’ve had pretty good success at
teaching parents to stop this form of punishment.”
Karen B. Baynes, a former Fulton County juvenile court associate judge
who now serves as deputy director for the Carl Vinson Institute of
Government at the University of Georgia, says that most people believe
it is their inherent right to discipline their children as they see fit,
and that they believe the law has gone too far in limiting this right.
“It is tough to determine when the law should step in and then if we do
remove children from the home, what is the plan to help them?”
Martha A. Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory,
challenged corporal punishment from a human rights perspective.
“Children are people, and they as much as adults are covered by existing
human rights treaties and are entitled to special provisions,” she said.
Fineman pointed to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child, which calls for children to be equal with adults but given
special attention from the state because they are vulnerable. (The
United States and Somalia are the only two U.N. member countries that
have not adopted the Convention.)
“The concept of ‘best interest of the child’ should be the primary
consideration in all actions taken by adults concerning children. This
means that the interest of parents or the state are not to be considered
as primary or of superior importance,” she said.
Further, Fineman added, “Ideally the state in policymaking would find it
necessary to conduct an impact analysis before making decisions that
affect children’s interests. This idea that there should be some
mechanism to guarantee that children’s interest have equal value in
decision-making is quite a radical thought.”
Fineman contrasted the equal-rights gains women have made to those of
children. “ Battery of intimate partners is no longer tolerated or
ignored; however similar evolution along egalitarian lines for children
has not kept pace. Battery of children by parents is still seen as
necessary ‘discipline’ by many, perhaps the result of misguided
ignorance, but certainly to be constitutionally tolerated or ignored
unless it passes over some high threshold on the way to abuse.”
Fineman challenged the United States to adopt the UN Convention as a
remedy. “Our constitutional tradition has long recognized parental
rights and protected parental prerogatives – it used privacy to shield
parental practices detrimental to the well-being of children. By
contrast, the child protected by the Convention has the right to
‘physical integrity’ and requires the state to take all appropriate
legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect
the child from all forms of physical or mental violence while in the are
of parents or legal guardians.”
### ...end of article....
If we on the current path, it's conceivable that in time we will be a
society where it is unacceptable to hit children to "teach them."
Along the way, we will come to a point where it's unlikely for us to get
over the hump that bias and prejudice creates to promote the
continuation of hitting to control children.
And nothing will do but a law.
I'd prefer we not come to that point, but I believe, despite the better
news Straus provides, that there is a marked drop in severity,
frequency, and injury to children in just the past couple of decades,
that point of a law being needed is inevitable.
The lessons learned by our socially responsible acts to end slavery,
exploitation of children, and the suppression of women, need to be
revisited. For all the outcry against those ills, they did not begin to
stop until laws were passed.
Those problems are still with us, but at least the victims have had
recourse since laws where passed, and we have seen a reality shift of
considerable proportions. Children are caught in a social backwater and
cannot move forward in many areas, including learning, until this
problem is faced, and conquered.
The same needs to happen for hit children that happened for Black
people, women, and exploited children.
They need the protection of law.
Kane
Release date: October 6, 2004
Contact: Elaine Justice, 404-727-0643, or April
Bogle,404-712-8713
ATLANTA – OCTOBER 6, 2004 – Despite an overall decline in the duration,
frequency and severity of corporal punishment during the past 40 years,
nearly all toddlers – regardless of religious faith or ethnicity -- are
spanked by their parents an average of three times per week., according
to Murray A. Straus, professor of sociology and co-director of the
Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.
Straus shared highlights of his more than three decades of research at
the Family Forum Series event, “Spare the Rod? Legal and Religious
Challenges in Raising Children of the Book,” Oct. 6, at Emory Law
School. The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion (CISR)
hosted the event.
Monica Kaufman, WSB-TV anchor, opened the event with a personal
perspective on corporal punishment, based on her childhood, her role as
a mother, and her work as a reporter covering child abuse cases. “I
don’t understand why you have to study to get a driver’s license, but
anyone can have a child,” she said.
Straus pointed out that approximately 55 percent of parents in 1999
agreed “it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard
spanking,” down from nearly 95 percent of parents in 1968. In addition,
parents now stop spanking earlier – 55 percent were hitting
13-year-old-children, versus 35 percent in 1995 who spanked children of
this age. Severity has decreased – there is a decline in the use of
belts, hairbrushes and paddles, and the number of times per day, week or
month also has declined.
Yet prevalence of spanking has remained high: nearly all children have
been spanked in their lives because 94 percent of parents spank toddlers.
Straus’ research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health,
includes children from birth to age 17 from some 20 countries.
Spanking remains prevalent even though research shows it is not more
effective in correcting behavior than other methods and over the
long-term and has harmful side effects. Children ages two and three
repeat their misbehavior within 5.5 hours of receiving corporal
punishment, versus 9.5 hours if they were disciplined with reasoning
only. One-year-olds who receive corporal punishment from their mothers
are compliant just over 50 percent of the time, versus a nearly 70
percent compliance rate from children who little or no corporal punishment.
“If you compare the effectiveness of corporal and non-corporal
punishment, they both are highly effective immediately after being
administered and both have a low-level of effectiveness after a few
hours or days of being administered. But over the long-term of months
and years, corporal punishment tends to make behavior worse and has
harmful side effects, such as increasing the probability of delinquency
as a child and depression as an adult , while non-corporal punishment is
more effective and has beneficial side effects,” said Straus.
He points out that there is a direct correlation between the frequency
of spanking and an increase in anti-social behavior in the two years
after the year in which the spanking occurred. For example,
Euro-American children ages six through nine who were spanked three
times per week showed an increase of more than 15 percent in anti social
behavior versus a decrease in antisocial behavior for those children not
spanked. Minority children who were spanked showed an increase in
approximately 12 percent in anti-social behavior in the two years after
the year spanking was measured.
A main focus of Straus’s talk was on the benefits of not spanking. He
presented research results showing that children who are not spanked are
less likely to:
* hit other children
* hit their parents
* become juvenile delinquents
* become criminal adults
* use domestic violence
* abuse children
Straus also shows that children who are not spanked have fewer social
and psychological problems, such as depression, drug use and suicide.
“What would a world be like without spanking?” Straus asked “Comparing
adults who were not spanked with those who received a high level of
corporal punishment, the not spanked were 47 percent more likely to
graduate from college, 46 percent were less likely to be seriously
depressed, 68 percent were less likely to hit their spouse, and 67
percent were less likely to physically abuse their own children.”
Religious and legal scholars commented on Straus’ findings at the
conclusion of his remarks. Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, Emory professor of
law, explained that the Jewish tradition accepts corporal punishment
with specific guidelines. “The duty of parents in the Jewish tradition
is to prepare their children for adulthood. Hitting is an acceptable
form of discipline for parents to use with their own children if the
child has not yet reached adolescence, if the situation requires the
teaching of a lesson, and if the parent objectively decides that this
form of discipline will provide that lesson.”
Broyde added that he feels it is wrong to rely on statistics alone when
determining the value of corporal punishment. “Each situation has its
own reality – it is child specific and adult specific,” he said.
The Reverend Dr. John Westerhoff, an Episcopal priest and
theologian-in-residence at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta,
espoused his understanding of the Christian perspective on corporal
punishment. First, he pointed out, the origin of the word “discipline”
derives from the Latin verb dicere, which means “to learn.”
“The first and primary role of parents in the discipline of their
children is that of role models…how we discipline ourselves and our
children needs to be consistent with the character traits of God, such
as God gives us what we need not deserve, God's justice is for
reconciliation not retribution,” he said, adding, “Discipline must not
be confused with punishment: discipline is positive, while punishment is
negative.”
Since anger, aggression and violence are among the most frequent
side-effects of punishment, Westerhoff recommends instead setting
appropriate boundaries for children. “Children need reasonable,
consistent limits that they participate in shaping, limits that are
modeled by their parents rather than shaped by rewards and punishment
for compliance,” he said. “They also need to be affirmed and loved as
persons of dignity as they learn to be disciplined disciples.”
Plemon T. El-Amin, Masjid Imam of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam,
offered the Islamic perspective on corporal punishment. First and
foremost, he pointed out, “A child is a trust from God who doesn’t
belong to parents, he comes through parents, and therefore we should
treat him as a property of God in a most sacred way.”
Within this spirit of compassion and caring, El-Amin explained that
Islam sanctions three ways to correct children’s behavior: first,
admonish verbally; second, isolate or restrict; third, use corporal
correction that does not bruise or scar and is given with intent to
remedy or help.
“When my grandparents said to me, ‘This hurts me more than it’s going to
hurt you,’ they really meant it,” El-Amin said, adding that he knew his
grandmother’s spankings were not conducted out of anger. “She would make
an appointment for me to come by her house on Saturday for my spanking.
I knew her love was great. Parents need to ask themselves if they are
correcting behavior because the child is bothering them, or because if
they don’t, this behavior is going to become a problem for the child.”
He further explained that in the Koran, the word for striking physically
is also used for striking the intellect or the soul. “The best method of
discipline is to strike the soul, or the consciousness of the child.”
Trenny Stovall, director of the Dekalb County Child Advocacy Center,
offered her legal perspective on the issue by explaining that the State
of Georgia allows corporal punishment, but that children are to be
protected from excessive or unreasonable physical injury by the Cruelty
to Children Act and the Family Violence Act. These protections prove
challenging because they can be very broadly defined in court, she said,
but even more inconsistent is the application of protection to children
who live in diverse communities. “Many of our residents come from
countries where things such as mutilation of girls, hot coins being
placed on skin, and binding children so they won’t eat after a certain
time, are cultural norms. We try to explain that in the United States,
this is excessive and unacceptable. We’ve had pretty good success at
teaching parents to stop this form of punishment.”
Karen B. Baynes, a former Fulton County juvenile court associate judge
who now serves as deputy director for the Carl Vinson Institute of
Government at the University of Georgia, says that most people believe
it is their inherent right to discipline their children as they see fit,
and that they believe the law has gone too far in limiting this right.
“It is tough to determine when the law should step in and then if we do
remove children from the home, what is the plan to help them?”
Martha A. Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory,
challenged corporal punishment from a human rights perspective.
“Children are people, and they as much as adults are covered by existing
human rights treaties and are entitled to special provisions,” she said.
Fineman pointed to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child, which calls for children to be equal with adults but given
special attention from the state because they are vulnerable. (The
United States and Somalia are the only two U.N. member countries that
have not adopted the Convention.)
“The concept of ‘best interest of the child’ should be the primary
consideration in all actions taken by adults concerning children. This
means that the interest of parents or the state are not to be considered
as primary or of superior importance,” she said.
Further, Fineman added, “Ideally the state in policymaking would find it
necessary to conduct an impact analysis before making decisions that
affect children’s interests. This idea that there should be some
mechanism to guarantee that children’s interest have equal value in
decision-making is quite a radical thought.”
Fineman contrasted the equal-rights gains women have made to those of
children. “ Battery of intimate partners is no longer tolerated or
ignored; however similar evolution along egalitarian lines for children
has not kept pace. Battery of children by parents is still seen as
necessary ‘discipline’ by many, perhaps the result of misguided
ignorance, but certainly to be constitutionally tolerated or ignored
unless it passes over some high threshold on the way to abuse.”
Fineman challenged the United States to adopt the UN Convention as a
remedy. “Our constitutional tradition has long recognized parental
rights and protected parental prerogatives – it used privacy to shield
parental practices detrimental to the well-being of children. By
contrast, the child protected by the Convention has the right to
‘physical integrity’ and requires the state to take all appropriate
legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect
the child from all forms of physical or mental violence while in the are
of parents or legal guardians.”
### ...end of article....
If we on the current path, it's conceivable that in time we will be a
society where it is unacceptable to hit children to "teach them."
Along the way, we will come to a point where it's unlikely for us to get
over the hump that bias and prejudice creates to promote the
continuation of hitting to control children.
And nothing will do but a law.
I'd prefer we not come to that point, but I believe, despite the better
news Straus provides, that there is a marked drop in severity,
frequency, and injury to children in just the past couple of decades,
that point of a law being needed is inevitable.
The lessons learned by our socially responsible acts to end slavery,
exploitation of children, and the suppression of women, need to be
revisited. For all the outcry against those ills, they did not begin to
stop until laws were passed.
Those problems are still with us, but at least the victims have had
recourse since laws where passed, and we have seen a reality shift of
considerable proportions. Children are caught in a social backwater and
cannot move forward in many areas, including learning, until this
problem is faced, and conquered.
The same needs to happen for hit children that happened for Black
people, women, and exploited children.
They need the protection of law.
Kane