Abandon the Rod and Save the Child.

Corporal punishment is the intentional infliction of physical pain for a perceived misbehavior.

It includes spanking, slapping, pinching, choking, and hitting with objects. The practice is not permitted against prison or jail inmates, military personnel, or mental patients; nor is it allowed against a spouse, a neighbor, or even a neighbor's dog. Instead, in the United States, corporal punishment is legally preserved only for children.

Children have been the victims since early colonial times and today remain so with the support of the courts and a significant percentage of the citizenry. Each year at least a million children are beaten in the name of "discipline," billions of dollars are spent on child abuse prevention, and the system devised to protect children fails. Yet, the subject is a divisive one that often pits generation against generation and family member against family member.

One reason for this divisiveness is corporal punishment's roots in theology. The strongest and most enduring support for the practice comes from the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Many fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic Protestants use scripture to justify their use of corporal punishment to develop obedience and character in children. Their position is that God wills and requires it in order to obtain his blessing and approval; to not physically punish children for misbehavior will incur God's wrath.

For example, in "The Correction and Salvation of Children" on the Way of Life website (way oflife.org/~dcloud/), the Reverend Ronald E. Williams of the Believers Baptist Church in Winona Lake, Indiana, contends that the biblical "rod of correction" is a physical object, in most cases a wooden paddle for use in spanking a child's buttocks; any unwillingness to use physical correction is "child abuse." While he recognizes that using an object to hit a child increases the chance of injury, and while he cautions that bruising is not the goal of "correction," Williams counsels parents not to be overly concerned if bruising happens:

   But these opponents of God's methods may object, "What you are suggesting
   will hurt the child and may even bruise him!" My response would be, "That
   is correct." A child may in fact be bruised by a session of difficult
   correction. In fact, the Lord has already anticipated this objection and
   has discussed it briefly in the Scriptures. "The blueness of a wound
   cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly" (Proverbs
   20:30). One may say, "That is talking about a child who has bruised himself
   in an accident at play." No, the latter part of the verse explains that God
   is giving this passage in the context of physical chastening for
   correction. God makes the point that if a child is bruised during one of
   these sessions of correction that a parent should not despair but realize
   that the blueness of the wound cleanses away the evil heart of rebellion
   and willful stubbornness that reside in that depraved little body.

Williams also believes that corporal punishment should begin early in life:

   My wife and I have a general goal of making sure that each of our children
   has his will broken by the time he reaches the age of one year. To do this,
   a child must receive correction when he is a small infant.

However, the Reverend Thomas E. Sagendorf, a Methodist pastor and member of the advisory board of the Center for Effective Discipline's program, End Physical Punishment of Children (EPOCH)--USA, points out that Old Testament scripture can also be used to justify slavery, suppression of women, polygamy, incest, and infanticide. So, like many believers in the Bible, Sagendorf prefers to look for guidance on disciplining children in the New Testament. There, he says, children are shown great love and compassion, and violence is not tolerated.

Rutgers University historian Philip Greven, in his 1992 book Spare the Child: The Religous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, paints a deeply disburbing picture of religion's influence on discipline and the consequences of that influence. Examining the effects of corporal punishment on the American psyche and culture, Greven reminds us that, although some of the fundamentalist Protestant groups are most outspoken in defending corporal punishment, they have a great deal of secular support.

He says centuries of strong Protestant traditions begun in Europe have been infused into modern U.S. law, education, and the behavioral sciences. The beliefs that children are inherently bad, that their wills must be broken, that their behavior must be controlled all have theological sources. Whether it was overtly or tacitly endorsed in our individual experiences, corporal punishment is deeply rooted in our psyches and, therefore, not easily or willingly examined. The first step in changing our consciousness and behavior toward children, Greven advises, is to confront the repressed fundamentalism in ourselves.

Fortunately, a growing willingness to challenge ingrained attitudes has resulted in a waning societal acceptance of corporal punishment. For example, almost universally accepted in the 1950s, the practice has decreased each generation since. In 1985 only five states had banned it in public schools; today twenty-seven states have done so. Even in those states that still allow corporal punishment, many of the larger cities have banned it. In 1991 the American Academy of Pediatrics called on parents, educators, legislators and other adults to seek the legal prohibition by all states of corporal punishment in schools. Unable to hush pro-spanking sentiments within in its own ranks, however, the AAP stopped short of calling for a complete ban in 1998. Instead it recommended that its members encourage and assist parents in developing nonviolent responses to misbehavior.

The changing perception of corporal punishment is being helped along by research in the field of physical abuse. Much of it is correlational and retrospective in nature, given the difficulty of designing such experiments and the abhorrence of assigning children spanking and paddling treatment. It is, however, compelling.

Greven examines the effects of corporal punishment on children in Spare the Child and there finds the roots of public and domestic violence. He says the religious and authoritarian nature of the practice leads children to accept violence without question and believe it is deserved. Rage unable to be expressed by a child is repressed and denied--but doesn't go away. It can later appear in the form of destructive and aggressive behavior toward others or, turned on the self, can lead to psychological problems such as depression and melancholia. Greven says many such problems can be traced to a history of pain, abuse, and suffering in childhood, and the most common source has always been corporal punishment.

In his 1994 book Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families, University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory Co-director Murray Straus reviews the dozens of studies he has authored or coauthored that show corporal punishment contributes to interpersonal violence. Among his results, Straus found that children who were spanked regularly and severely have higher rates of hitting siblings, hitting their spouses as adults, and assaulting someone outside their family. Children who are frequently spanked for lying, cheating, hitting siblings, and being disobedient are more likely to display these kinds of antisocial behaviors.

Studies by Straus and others have also found that corporal punishment can escalate to the level of abuse prohibited by law. Since parents are more likely to spank when they are tired, stressed, depressed, and fatigued, and a majority of parents express moderate to high anger when spanking children, it is little surprise that parents who believe in corporal punishment are more likely to injure children than parents who do not. And children who are regularly spanked are more likely to continue the practice on the next generation and to show less remorse for wrongdoing as adults.

Even infrequent and moderate spanking in childhood can have deleterious effects in adult life, including a greater likelihood of depression and other psychological problems. Conversely, Straus found that children who are rarely or never spanked score higher on cognitive tests than those who are frequently spanked. He theorizes that parents who don't spank spend more time reasoning with and explaining to children, thus maximizing verbal ability.

A recent U.S. Department of Education survey indicates that about 500,000 students are hit each year in the nation's public schools. Physical injuries, including hematomas and broken bones, have resulted from adults hitting children in school with boards--sometimes in anger and in unobserved and unsupervised settings. The National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, another program of the Center for Effective Discipline, estimates that 2 percent of children who are paddled need medical care. Twenty years of DOE surveys analyzed by the coalition and the center reveal that corporal punishment in schools is used more frequently on children with disabilities, poor children, boys, and minority children.

Despite the compelling research, the task of ending corporal punishment in the United States is a daunting one. All too often repeated by those who grew up with violence are comments like "My parents hit me because they loved me" and "I got hit because I deserved it." Progress is likely to be slow and incremental, but it is not impossible.

The last fifteen years have seen a great deal of progress on a state-by-state basis. For example, nineteen of the twenty-seven states that have banned corporal punishment in public schools did so between 1985 and 1994. The remaining twenty-three states without bans--primarily southern and southwestern states--allow local boards of education to determine whether corporal punishment may be used.

And there is a slow but steady increase in the number of those school boards adopting voluntary bans--frequently to avoid potential litigation resulting from paddling injuries. In Ohio, child advocates were unable to get a complete ban, but they got so many restrictions put into law that only forty-two out of 611 school districts report using corporal punishment. Each year a few more districts enact a local ban, making a statewide ban likely in the near future.

The use of corporal punishment in other child-caring settings (daycare centers, foster care, and institutions) varies from state to state. State regulatory agencies are moving toward complete bans, and a great deal of legislative and regulatory progress has been made over the past twenty years because of extensive public education campaigns.

Perhaps an easier route is to get a federal ban on corporal punishment. Schools could be prompted to comply by tying federal funding to requirements for adopting bans, as Democratic Representative Major Owens of New York attempted in the early 1990s.

In all this, the United States is taking a lesson from Europe, where corporal punishment in schools was banned long ago. Nine European countries--Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Italy (by court decision), Latvia, Norway, and Sweden--have banned corporal punishment in all settings, including homes.

Sweden was the first country to act. It took away parents' specific authority to use corporal punishment, then passed a comprehensive ban three years later in 1979, accompanied by a large-scale education effort. The law is generally used to require educational training of parents who hit children, but offenders can be subjected to criminal prosecution. The overall process has resulted in an overwhelming acceptance of the ban in Sweden and, more importantly, a decline in child abuse. U.S. child advocates are watching carefully as a number of countries--including Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom--are studying this model for possible adoption.

In Canada, an effort is underway to abolish Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which gives parents authority to use "reasonable chastisement" on children. Abolition of this section is likely to be followed by a complete ban that follows the Swedish model. Meanwhile, Susan Bitensky, a law professor and EPOCH advisory board member, has suggested criminalizing corporal punishment of children and making violators subject to the same criminal penalties imposed in adult assaults and batteries. In the winter 1998 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Bitensky says such a law could be effective if accompanied by prosecutorial restraint and a strong public education program, such as that used in the Swedish model.

The most successful initiatives to end corporal punishment have included public education campaigns. With that in mind, EPOCH initiated SpankOut Day USA on April 30, 1998. Modeled after the Great American Smokeout, the annual observance seeks to bring widespread attention to the need to end corporal punishment of children as an important way of addressing the U.S. child abuse and neglect emergency. In the first two years, more than 400 informational events were held for parents and educators.

EPOCH emphasizes discipline as teaching rather than punishment. While its current activities are largely educational in nature, the organization also seeks legal reform. An important step forward in that effort would be the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides a legal basis for improving the lives of children throughout the world. Specifically, the international agreement requires ratifying countries to take measures to protect children from abuse and neglect and strongly supports nonviolent discipline of children. The United States and Somalia are the only countries that haven't adopted the convention. Many of the nations that have are using it to support their efforts to ban corporal punishment in homes.

However, one doesn't have to have the backing of an entire nation or even an entire organization to make inroads toward abolishing corporal punishment. The following are a few guidelines that individuals can use to develop cooperative, self-disciplined children:

* Stop using corporal punishment on your own children.

* View children's misbehavior as a mistake in judgment. It will be easier to think of ways to teach better behavior.

* Teach behavior you want to see. You probably will need to do that more than once for most behaviors. Praise will increase the behavior you want to see.

* Establish behavior rules that are few in number, reasonable, and appropriate for each child's age and development. Enforce these rules consistently.

* Develop routines and consistency in important daily events, including mealtimes, study times, and bedtimes. It helps prevent discipline problems.

* Distract infants and toddlers when they are doing something you don't like or remove them from the situation. They lack understanding of right and wrong and shouldn't be hit or shaken.

* Use good manners when talking to children about behavior. Be a role model for children in speech and actions.

Individuals can also endorse SpankOut Day and encourage others to do the same. There are a number of ways to do this:

* Participate in the event.

* Organize an informational event in your community.

* Write a letter explaining the event and its goals to the editors of your local newspapers.

* Encourage organizations serving children and families in your community to distribute event materials.

* Make a copy of the SpankOut Day Proclamation, sign it, and send it to EPOCH. The proclamation reads:

   SpankOut Day Proclamation

      Whereas, all children need guidance and deserve to grow up in an
   environment free from physical harm, and

      Whereas, millions of children suffer child abuse each year in the name
   of discipline, and

      Whereas, corporal punishment of children provides a poor model for
   solving interpersonal problems, leads to pro-violence attitudes, and
   contributes to the cycle of abuse, and

      Whereas, violence to children is a preventable harm, and

      Whereas, preventing physical violence to children includes learning and
   using nonviolent discipline methods:

      Now, therefore, we declare April 30, 2000, to be SpankOut Day in our
   community and advocate childrearing practices that develop caring,
   responsible, self-disciplined adults.

Nadine Block is director of the Center for Effective Discipline and cochair of EPOCH--USA, which makes available copyright-free written materials on discipline and SpankOut Day. Contact the organization at 155 West Main Street #1603, Columbus, OH43215; [phone]; [e-mail]. The SpankOut Day Proclamation can also be found on the center's website at www.stophitting.com.