What are two factors related to corporal punishment that lead to negative consequences for children?

Corporal punishment outlawed in 59 countries

Corporal punishment has been outlawed in all settings, including by parents in their homes, in 59 countries as of February 2020 [Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2020]. In 1979, Sweden became the first country to outlaw corporal punishment, followed by Finland [1983], Norway [1987], and Austria [1989]. More recently, the number of countries passing bans has accelerated as part of a global movement to end corporal punishment, in large part in response to international monitoring related to protecting children from all forms of abuse as outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In some countries, attitudes about corporal punishment became less favorable prior to the ban, facilitating the change in the law. For example, in Sweden, in the years leading up to the ban, national surveys demonstrated that parents’ endorsement of the statement that corporal punishment is sometimes necessary fell from 53% in 1965 to 35% in 1971 [Durrant, 1996]. Over this same time period parents increasingly agreed with the statement that children should be brought up without corporal punishment [from 35% to 60%; Durrant, 1996]. Endorsement of corporal punishment continued to decline after the legal ban. In other countries, bans were passed to change attitudes and behaviors [sometimes in response to international pressure] rather than because attitudes and behaviors were changing already. For example, even 3 years after corporal punishment was outlawed in Togo, 77% of parents in a nationally representative sample reported that their children had experienced corporal punishment in the last month, and 37% reported that using corporal punishment is necessary to rear a child properly [Lansford et al., 2017].

Outlawing corporal punishment is not always sufficient to change parents’ attitudes and behaviors. Unless the change in law is publicized, parents may not be aware that corporal punishment is no longer legal. For example, 1 year after the legal ban in Germany, 70% of German parents were not aware of the ban [Bussmann, 2004]. In a study of nationally representative samples of 56,371 parents in 8 countries using data from UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, parents’ use of corporal punishment and belief that corporal punishment is necessary to rear a child properly were not systematically related to the legal status of corporal punishment [Lansford et al., 2017]. For example, Togo outlawed corporal punishment in 2007, yet more parents reported believing it was necessary to use corporal punishment after than before the ban [37% in 2010 compared to 33% in 2006]. However, in other countries, the percentage of parents who reported believing it is necessary to use corporal punishment declined over time [e.g., from 14% in 2005 to 10% in 2012 in Ukraine, which outlawed corporal punishment in 2004; from 57% in 2005–6 to 43% in 2009–10 in Sierra Leone, which has not outlawed corporal punishment as of 2020].

Beliefs and behaviors related to corporal punishment change most when legal bans are accompanied by publicity and educational campaigns [Bussmann, Erthal, & Schroth, 2011]. Publicity sometimes involves public awareness campaigns to ensure that parents are aware of the change in the law [Durrant & Smith, 2011]. Educational campaigns generally involve teaching parents about alternate forms of discipline. For example, the Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting Program, which has been adapted for use in many countries, tries to reduce parents’ use of punishment by increasing their awareness of different problem-solving strategies during parent-child conflicts, helping parents take a more child-centered approach to parenting, and building emotionally close parent-child relationships [Durrant et al., 2017].

Efforts to change beliefs and behaviors might have the most potential for success when they are adapted to address existing beliefs held by particular cultural groups. For example, conservative Christians use corporal punishment more frequently than other religious groups in the United States, likely because of a “spare the rod spoil the child” interpretation of biblical teachings [Mahoney & Boyatzis, 2019]. At a Christian college, students were randomly assigned to an intervention that presented only scientific findings on the detrimental effects of corporal punishment, an intervention that presented scientific findings in addition to a biblical reinterpretation of the passages most often cited as endorsements of corporal punishment, or a control group. Attitudes changed the most from before to after the intervention in the biblical reinterpretation group [Perrin, Miller-Perrin, & Song, 2017]. The findings suggest that educational efforts to change beliefs about corporal punishment and decrease its use should attend to why parents believe corporal punishment is necessary.

6.1 Distinguishing Corporal Punishment of Children From Child Abuse

Attempts to distinguish corporal punishment of children from child abuse are fraught with difficulties. Such distinctions must, of necessity, deny the child’s rights to dignity and to protection from physical and emotional harm, as increasing research evidence suggests. Gershoff, Lee, and Durrant [2017] similarly contend that “the dichotomy between physical punishment and physical abuse is a false one that legitimises violence against children”. It is notable that 11–17-year-olds in Mason and Falloon’s [1999] research poignantly “described abusive behaviour as that perpetuated by persons who use power to control those they consider as lesser”. They perceived abuse as “feeling let down by those with whom they are in an emotional relationship [and] discounted because of their age”. Adults, they said, are “not allowed to smack anyone else but children,” and a child “can’t do anything back”. They saw this context as integral to child abuse.

Child Abuse

Distinguishing between appropriate corporal punishment and physical punishment that constitutes child abuse is a difficult task. One distinction is that physical abuse results in nonaccidental physical injury to the child, while corporal punishment may cause temporary discomfort, but should not result in lasting harm. What is clear, however, is that parent–offspring conflict plays an important role in several different types of child maltreatment, including physical abuse.

When research has focused on parent–offspring conflict and physical abuse, several patterns of findings emerge. To begin with, abuse frequently seems to result from poor parental management of conflict. Parents often report losing control during the course of a conflict episode and resorting to physical violence. This escalation appears to be profoundly related to coercive family processes. Abusive parents are more likely to report perceiving their children as holding the majority of power during conflict situations, and thus feel the need to reassert their dominance through physical means. Furthermore, aggressive behavior in children has also been found to provoke aggression in parents. What may distinguish abusive families from those characterized by the coercive family processes described previously is that in an abusive family, the cycle of escalating aversive behaviors is terminated, not by the parent abandoning the conflict, but instead by responding with physical aggression against their child.

As with all investigations of parent–child conflict, a developmental perspective is important. As children develop, the eliciting events for abuse may change. During the infant and toddler years, the majority of conflict-to-abuse incidents revolve around the child's need for nurturance [e.g., conflict around feeding routines] or the toddler's inability to regulate their behavior in response to parental instructions [such as during toilet training]. In middle childhood, abusive incidents more often revolve around the child's refusal to comply with social standards, such as lying to their parents. As would be anticipated, as adolescents gain both more freedom and more responsibility, abuse during this developmental period tends to stem from conflicts around obedience and compliance. Rates of abuse also appear to increase as children get older, with more than 25% of reported abuse cases concerning adolescents. Indeed, abusive patterns of interaction may emerge for the first time during adolescence as parents find the balance of power shifting and their previous strategies for discipline and conflict management ineffective against their newly autonomous adolescents.

Child Abuse

Child abuse within the family encompasses physical coercion and excessive use of corporal punishment and battering. Sexual abuse is also a prevalent form of child abuse in families, with girls targeted more often than boys. Child neglect, especially of infants, accounts for a large proportion of reports and fatalities, although our analysis here is limited to physically or sexually aggressive assaults on children. What comprises abuse by community standards, policy, or the law is sometimes at odds with how psychologists might view harsh or abusive parenting. In general, communities are tolerant of a wide range of coercive tactics and the rights of parents to inflict what might be seen as harmful measures in their child rearing. The age of a child is a significant factor in raising community alarm, however. Physical attacks against young children, under 3 years of age, are more likely to result in injury, and are more likely to receive the attention of law enforcement and child protective services, than when applied to school-aged children. The emotional and psychological damage incurred from repeated or severe physical corporal punishment, however, has been well documented. In addition, children who witness or observe intimate partner violence display psychological problems on par with children who are directly abused. Living in a home in which there is intimate partner violence, therefore, constitutes a form of child maltreatment.

Outcomes of Physical Punishment

Murray Straus and his colleagues have done decades of work on correlates of corporal punishment of children and adolescents. Their work shows the following:

Adults whose parents hit them as adolescents are more likely to be depressed than those whose parents did not. The effect is proportionate to the amount of hitting, and independent of the effects of poverty and heavy drinking.

Adults whose parents hit them a lot as adolescents are more likely to have thoughts about killing themselves.

Children whose parents used corporal punishment are more than twice as likely to severely attack a brother or sister than children whose parents did not. Physically abused children are even more likely to attack a sibling.

Adults hit as adolescents are more likely to hit their spouses. The effect is proportionate to the amount of hitting and is much the same for women as for men. There is evidence that the effect is mediated through social learning, depression, and inadequate development of nonviolent conflict–resolution skills.

The more a parent hits a child, the greater the chances that that parent will also hit his/her spouse.

The more corporal punishment parents use on teenagers, the greater the chances of delinquent behavior in the teens. This effect is enhanced by marital violence.

Adults who were hit as adolescents are more likely to physically assault someone outside the family.

The more children are hit by parents, the greater the probability that they will experience masochistic sexual arousal in adulthood.

The more corporal punishment was experienced as an adolescent, the lower the chances of being in the top fifth of the population economically. The mediators proposed are depression, violence, alienation, and diminished initiative and creativity.

Children who are spanked are more likely to show antisocial behavior. When a sample of children was tested for antisocial behavior at two-year intervals, the degree to which antisocial behavior had worsened was proportionate to the frequency of spanking at the time of first sampling. Children who were not spanked at first sampling had improved in antisocial behavior over two years. This last piece of research strongly suggests that the direction of causality goes from spanking to antisocial behavior and not the reverse direction. The effect was found to be independent of the degree of parental emotional support of the child.

Elizabeth Gershoff published a meta-analysis of 88 studies on outcomes of corporal punishment in 2002. It confirmed correlations between corporal punishment and problems in the parent–child relationship, childhood aggression, other delinquent and antisocial behavior, poor mental health, subsequent adult aggression, criminal and antisocial behavior, and poor adult mental health. In addition, it pointed out the effectiveness of physical punishment in securing immediate obedience from a child, that physical punishment correlates negatively with moral internalization of precepts, and that physical punishment correlates with physical abuse of children.

Other researchers have confirmed many of the above findings and have shown in addition that:

college students who were physically punished in childhood have fewer friends and a greater frequency of negative social interactions;

people who were physically punished as children are less likely to see themselves as acceptable or to feel any personal control over life outcomes;

corporal punishment is a significant psychological stressor for youth, even at low levels [once or twice a year]. Its effects are partly mitigated by high parental support, except when corporal punishment is very frequent;

the intellectual development of young girls may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of parenting. Three-year-old girls who had experienced harsh discipline had IQ scores 8 points below controls. Where harsh discipline occurred with low maternal warmth, IQ was depressed by 12 points.

While there seems to be an overwhelming volume of findings suggesting a causal relationship between the use of corporal punishment and a number of undesirable outcomes, there are some research findings that suggest a respectful approach to the complexity of the process of socializing children. In one study, spanking of children [4–7 year olds] deterred the development of subsequent aggressive behavior in black children. However, for white children 8–11 years old, spanking fostered the subsequent development of fighting behavior.

Another study has replicated the above differential results for African- and European-American children. Why should this be so? One suggestion is that spanking is seen as culturally normal by black children. Since it is the norm for almost all ethnic groups, this is a dubious explanation. An alternative explanation is that among African-American families, the lack of physical punishment may indicate an abdication of the parental role, rather than the substitution of nonviolent methods, thus leading to unfavorable outcomes.

In a study of the effects of parental involvement and corporal punishment on adolescent aggressiveness, delinquency, and psychological well-being, the quality of parental involvement was significantly associated with all three outcomes. Once the effect of parental involvement was removed, corporal punishment had no independent effect on outcome. However, the authors pointed out that the use of corporal punishment was negatively related to the quality of parental involvement and to children’s feelings that the same-sex parent cared about them. There is also the issue of the child’s construction of meaning around the event of being physically punished. There may be a difference for the child in experiencing a controlled spanking and being beaten by an out-of-control, furious parent. Some children may accept the system of ideas around the use of physical punishment. A Tibetan court calligrapher described being caned to the point of bleeding by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama when he was a 13 year-old. He then expressed the belief that his good health and long life had resulted from these “blessing” beatings.

The child’s perception of acceptance and being loved and cared for versus being rejected and viewed with hostility is a major determinant of outcome in psychological development. This will be influenced by how much the child is physically chastised, the parent’s demeanor while punishing, and the child’s perception of justice and benign or malign intent in the punishment. The child’s construction of meaning around the events of discipline is likely to be important in determining outcome.

Psychologist Diane Baumrind has disputed the use of findings such as those mentioned earlier to inform public policy on the treatment of children. She points out that the findings are correlational and do not prove causal linkages, and that when the more severe end of the spectrum of physical discipline is removed, the correlations weaken.

Cultural and Historical Factors

Certainly, cultural values and society's attitudes toward such issues as violence, corporal punishment, and children can impact the prevalence of abuse and neglect. Historical events can also influence society's perceptions and attitudes about children. The prevalence of violence in America is high, including violent crimes such as homicide, rape, and spousal abuse. When a society has high tolerance for violence, the rates of family violence also tend to be higher.

Society's views around child discipline are also a factor in child maltreatment. The physical punishment of children is accepted in some countries, including the United States. Children are the only individuals in the United States who can legally be physically punished. While the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution protects criminals from cruel and unusual punishment, Supreme Court decisions have found that the rights of children differ from other groups of individuals. The general attitude of society is that children are the property of the parent and are to be handled in the manner parents decide. Attitudes such as those previously mentioned can play a prominent role in child maltreatment, as such attitudes provide the groundwork for abuse and neglect.

Stress Response and Suicidal Behavior

Childhood physical and sexual abuse has been associated with suicidal behavior. Those who experience corporal punishment in adolescence are reported to be at increased risk of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and alcohol abuse. Suicidal ideation increases markedly with the frequency of adolescent corporal punishment for both males and females. In fact, adolescent suicide attempters are three to six times more likely than controls to have had contact with the social services department. They also commonly had notations in their chart about child abuse. In a college sample, 16% of men and 24% of women reported sexual abuse as children. Such a history predicted depression, chronic self-destructiveness, suicidal ideation and attempts, self-mutilation, and substance abuse. The younger the person was at time of first abuse, the higher the number of suicide attempts reported. Similarly, in a sample of depressed individuals, suicide attempters were more likely to have experienced sexual abuse themselves as children, and their offspring were also at increased risk for being sexually abused and for being suicide attempters, than were depressed individuals who were not suicide attempters. These findings support the link between childhood abuse and subsequent suicidal behavior.

Childhood physical and sexual abuse has been linked to abnormalities in the stress response as mediated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal [HPA] axis. The HPA axis, with its intricate two-way interaction with the serotonergic system, has been proposed to play a key role in the correlation between early stress exposure and later impulsivity, aggression, and suicidal behavior. Indeed, suicidal behavior seems to be related to hyperactivity of the HPA axis. Among depressed individuals, those with a hyperactive HPA axis, as demonstrated by an inability to suppress cortisol in the face of external steroid administration [dexamethasone suppression test], have been reported to have a ninefold elevation in risk for suicide. Moreover, suicide victims have larger adrenal glands, which produce stress hormones and low prefrontal cortex corticotropin releasing hormone binding, consistent with a hyperactive HPA axis.

Introduction

In the context of this encyclopedia, judicial punishment refers to physical punishment, including corporal punishment and/or capital punishment. Judicial punishment has long been, and will likely continue to be, a topic of heated debates. The intention here is to give a historical perspective on judicial punishment as it applies to capital punishment, rather than expound one view or another. As part of this historical perspective, this article is an overview of the stance taken by the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The underlying justification for this approach is that even societies that proclaim themselves secular, or even atheistic, are informed in their conduct and views by their heritage and that of their forebears. An American may not of necessity be a churchgoer to be influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition. Furthermore, in recent years religion has become a major part of the debate, as witnessed by several national and international conferences such as the series A Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty, sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Corporal Punishment

The form of power assertion that has generated the most attention and debate over the past few decades is corporal punishment. More specifically, the question of whether or not corporal punishment produces more negative outcomes than other disciplinary techniques has been the center of much concern. Indeed, the debate has spread to legislative bodies, with corporal punishment outlawed in more than 50 countries. In contrast, more than 70% of Americans surveyed in 2013 agreed that it was sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking [Smith et al., 2013]. In an earlier study 48% of Canadian parents reported that they had used physical punishment in the form of smacking, slapping and pinching in the past year [Oldershaw, 2002]. Moreover, it appears unlikely that the United States, at least, would outlaw its use in the very near future, both because of the importance placed on corporal punishment in the history of that country, as well as the fact that American beliefs about the privacy of the family and personal freedom discourages government intervention into family life [Holden, 2002]. In Canada, in 2004, the Supreme Court upheld a provision of the Criminal Code enabling teachers, parents, and legal guardians to use reasonable force to correct children. Reasonable force had to be “by way of correction”; the child had to be able to benefit from the correction, that is, be between 2 and 12 years of age; and it had to be administered with a bare hand and not result in bodily harm or leave a mark that lasted for several hours.

There are good reasons for prohibiting corporal punishment. One has to do with the rights of children--if it is illegal to hit adults then why is it legal to hit children? Thus, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child describes corporal punishment as invariably degrading. [The Committee also cites other forms of unacceptable power assertion including punishment that belittles, denigrates, scapegoats, threatens, scares, or ridicules the child.] A second good reason for prohibiting corporal punishment is that it provides a less than desirable model for conflict resolution. On the other hand, supporters of occasional mild corporal punishment [spanking a child's extremities with an open hand and done in a context of caring] argue that it is a useful socialization tool [Baumrind, 2002]. It is also a procedure that children accept as reasonable and fair [Helwig et al., 2014].

So what does the evidence indicate? Contrary to assertions sometimes made that corporal punishment and physical abuse are causally related, this does not seem to be the case. The two are correlated and statistics indicate that there is a link between favorable attitudes to corporal punishment and extreme physical abuse [World Health Organization, 2002], and that parents who have spanked their children when they are one year of age have a greater probability of being involved with child protection services in subsequent years [Lee et al., 2014]. However, Jaffee et al. [2004] found that shared genetic influences account for a substantial part of the correlation between corporal punishment and antisocial behavior but not for that between physical abuse and antisocial behavior. This finding would suggest, then, that corporal punishment and physical abuse, although correlated, have different origins: corporal punishment is more likely to have its source in genetic similarities between parent and child, whereas physical abuse has its roots in aspects of the abusive parent's characteristics and the family environment.

The context in which corporal punishment is administered has been shown to be important in affecting its impact on the child. Corporal punishment is more likely to be associated with externalizing problems in European American children, for example, than in African American children where it is associated with a decrease in antisocial behavior [Lansford et al., 2004]. One explanation for this difference is that physical punishment is viewed in African-American families as normative, fair, and appropriate and not the result of parent anger, rejection, and loss of control. In a study of cultural differences in the impact of corporal punishment, Lansford et al. [2005] assessed its associations with children's aggression and anxiety in six countries that differed in how normative the use of this form of punishment was seen to be. They found that the association between corporal punishment and aggression or anxiety was less in countries with the highest use of corporal punishment [Kenya, India, and Italy] than in countries with lowest use [Thailand, China, and the Philippines]. However, in all countries, regardless of how normative its use, there was still an association between harsh parent discipline and children's negative outcomes. In a further examination of the issue, Lansford et al. [2010] found that, when children perceived harsh punishment on the part of the parent as a sign of rejection, they were more likely to be adversely affected.

A great many studies have looked at the relation between corporal punishment and children's externalizing problems. Early ones were primarily correlational so the direction of effects could not be inferred and many also did not distinguish between corporal punishment and physical abuse. More recent studies have corrected these problems by collecting longitudinal data and by separating corporal punishment from physical abuse. In a meta-analysis of 75 studies that included 160,927 children from 13 countries, Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor [2016] found substantial support for the position that corporal punishment does lead to externalizing problems.