It’s Legal to Hit Children. In Fact, It’s Downright Popular.
The term ‘corporal punishment’ is an archaism, or at best a legal term. No one pauses to consider what it means in a literal sense: to punish the body. In 19 states, punishing the body of a child is legal in schools. In 50 states, it is legal in homes.
Let’s get one thing straight: corporal punishment, or spanking, is hitting. Straight out of the dictionary: to strike (a person, usually a child) with the open hand, a slipper, etc., especially on the buttocks, as in punishment.
I say this because you’ll often hear those who support hitting children say that a spanking is not hitting. It is hitting, and I am wholly uninterested in the opinions of those jesuitical many who equivocate or wish to talk about differences of degree. If you are talking about differences of degree when it comes to hitting children, what a moral path you’ve wandered.
As for the common argument in defense of hitting kids that goes “I was spanked and I turned out alright,” no, you didn’t turn out alright. You think it’s okay to hit kids — you are not alright.
Why the sudden and forceful article? Because a principal in Florida who hit a six-year-old was investigated by the state’s attorney general, and it happened to make the news because it was caught on video. A lot of things stand out about the incident, but what’s interesting is that the incident stands out at all.
Nationwide, it was estimated in 2014 that a student in school was hit by an educator every 30 seconds. It’s legal for educators to hit children in Florida. In fact, when it comes to hitting kids at home, six — the age of the child in Florida — is one of the most common ages for getting hit by your parents.
So how do Americans feel about hitting children? And what does the law have to say?
- This mother, who went viral and was widely praised for flailing at her son with a belt through an open car door on the side of a highway, so far as I know did not face any legal consequences.
- Adrian Peterson drew blood from a toddler, but, spanking apologists tell us, everything is okay because that wasn’t actually a spanking. Spanking, they tell us, isn’t abuse. But even whipping a child until their scrotum bleeds, like Peterson did, didn’t provoke universal condemnation.
- The school staff the tweets this article cite? They didn’t break the law, even if the person they were hitting was an adult. Under current law, the fact of being enrolled in a public school trumps legal adulthood when it comes to whether the principal can hit you. So said an appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme court let the decision stand without a hearing.
- There is no uniform law on hitting students in school across the states where it is legal. Some districts permit it and some don’t. Some have age limitations, but most don’t. The how and the why vary, but there are patterns in the who: boys, people of color, students with disabilities, students who are poor — all of which overlap.
- Schools in the south are especially jealous of their alleged “right” to hit children, but parents in Massachusetts zealously defended theirs, too.
Specific instances aside, most Americans think it’s okay to hit kids, including whomever is hitting 10% of 16–17 year olds. And the self-reported incidence of hitting kids (like that 10% figure) is a dramatic underestimate, especially for the youngest children.
Consider: an 18-year-old can vote, own a gun, and serve in the military, and in Texas and 18 other states, they can be hit by school officials. So say multiple federal courts. The reasoning goes that the student’s parents consented to corporal punishment when the student was a minor, and in any case, once the student is an adult, they implicitly consent by staying enrolled in the school knowing its policies. Let’s deconstruct this line of legal reasoning:
- The parents’ prior consent overrules the student’s even when the student is an adult.
- In the moment, the adult student does not have the right to withdraw that consent.
- An adult student implicitly consents by remaining enrolled in the school.
- A student who does not want to be hit cannot refuse except by dropping out of school. In itself extreme, that there’s likely no school in the district that doesn’t permit hitting apparently doesn’t matter, just like the consequences of dropping out of school don’t matter as far as the court is concerned.
That case, Serafin v. School of Excellence in Education (Case №07–9760), originated in Texas, where it’s illegal for parents to hit their eighteen-year-old sons and daughters but not for schools to do literally the same thing. The lawyer for the school further contended that if this adult hadn’t tried to defend her body from the person assaulting it, her hand wouldn’t have been smashed and the trip to the emergency room — after school; the student took herself there, the ‘educator’ did not send an injured student to the emergency room —wouldn’t have been necessary and she never would have needed her hand put in a cast.
Most egregious in the ruling is the adult student does not have the right to withdraw consent (even thought there is no such thing as mandatory consent). Little wonder it is so difficult to prosecute sexual assault in the judicial system that concocted that legal idiocy, and if the comparison doesn’t seem apt, consider that both are violations of a person’s body.
On the subject of sexual assault, some districts allow educators to hit students of the opposite gender. Given the popularity of spanking as a sexual act (consensual? more power to you), it seems like an invitation for someone to abuse their authority for sexual gratification, which seems very likely to have been the case for this judge who ordered parents to do what the judicial system itself cannot. Some argue that spanking children should be illegal precisely because it is a sex act for consenting adults.
So what is considered abuse, and what’s the “okay” kind of hitting a child? There’s no uniform law on that either. Leave a bruise, a mark, draw blood? Hit a child for spilling milk? Depends on what state the person doing the hitting is in and the cop or CPS official who evaluates the case, which is exceedingly unlikely to ever come to anyone’s attention. The Coronavirus pandemic, by keeping children away from teachers and counselors who know to look for a abuse while trapping more kids at home with their abusers, made that even worse.
The reams of evidence demonstrating the harm of hitting children, and the benefits of other approaches to discipline, don’t matter to people’s views. Even simplistic logic fails to break through— if it works so well, why do some parents find cause to hit so often, sometimes increasing the severity and in rare cases continuing until the child is no longer a minor?
The reason is because hitting children is a cherished so-called right, culturally ingrained, that many believe is not just preferable to other forms of discipline but literally necessary for raising kids. Spare the rod, and you will spoil the child, says not just the bible but many Americans. In fact, the acceptability of hitting kids may be one of the few topics that, while there are racial, religious, and political differences of degree, unites many Americans of differing faiths and political beliefs: as of 2018, 66% of Americans adults agree with the statement, “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.”
But despite the majority agreement, some groups are much more enthusiastic than others. Evangelical Christians go to broad lengths to justify hitting their kids. These Jehovah’s Witness members and former members describe a paddle hanging in the women’s restroom at the Kingdom Hall and the frequency of parents hitting kids as young as two years old for fussing during services. Some states exempt religious daycares and schools from laws designed to prevent child abuse in secular and public settings, with predictably tragic consequences.
One church offers an entire webpage of how-to advice, with an extensive Q&A for parents who want to know if hitting a child will hurt their feelings, whether their teen may derive sexual gratification from it, and how to continue hitting their children now that the child is a teenager. Spoiler: the church says if the parent had hit the child correctly during the preteen years, the child will be sufficiently cowed as a teen to not fight back.
Ted Cruz hits his daughter, and for a while in 2016, he wouldn’t stop talking about it because he knew, especially in Texas, hitting children is a popular position, especially among republicans. He even implied it would be okay to hit Hillary Clinton (the man who Ted Cruz lost to, infamously, just outright said it), and if hitting adults doesn’t seem okay to you (thank goodness), there are some folks who, not including those who do it for sexual reasons, think husbands should hit wives, most but not all of whom claim a religious justification. If that seems fringe, it wasn’t fringe a few decades ago when Ricky was hitting Lucy and it made for such great TV that re-runs were being aired when I was a kid in the 1990s. A century ago, it was permissible for the man of the house to hit anyone in the household — his kids, his wife, and even his employees.
The connection between conservatism and being pro-spanking is both well established and not at all counter-intuitive. It’s a nest of correlations between religious belief, a worshipful deference to the ways things have always been that is the heart of Burkean philosophy, and social and political conservatism. There’s even evidence of an authoritarian mindset that crosses over from parenting to politics.
The authoritarian parenting style is defined by psychologists as parents who have “very high expectations of their children, yet provide very little in the way of feedback and nurturing. Mistakes tend to be punished harshly. When feedback does occur, it is often negative.” It’s not synonymous with hitting, but “Yelling and corporal punishment are also common in the authoritarian style … People with this parenting style often use punishment rather than discipline. They are not willing or able to explain the reasoning behind their rules.”
It’s not hard to draw the connection between because I say so and the sociopolitical philosophy of because that’s the way it’s always been. This kind of parenting is objectively and observably harmful to children. Adherence to this style of parenting is also a strong predictor of support for Trump. If confronted with the fact of stable, prosperous societies where hitting is illegal, perhaps they’d tell us not hitting your kids leads to socialism.
If you want to deep dive into some of the more disgusting parts of the internet, go look for the connections some people make between not hitting kids and school shootings (and other kinds of crimes and social ills, including incest). Worse, which wouldn’t seem possible except it is, there are places online where you can find parents exchanging advice, encouraging each other, and even bragging about hitting kids. You’ll find hardly any parent — if they are parents and not people living out a fantasy — telling someone they were abusive or even wrong, even when they describe bruising their child. Some of them only want to date people who also hit their kids. For these folks, it’s not a last resort but a first and often only resort. For them, getting to hit a kid is one of the best parts of parenting.
There’s a trend among some parents to admit to spanking and then ask to not be judged for it, a request basically reminding people that they weren’t there, they don’t know what corrections the parent had already tried or what repeat misbehavior they had endured. Yet even in these most reluctant of cases, the subtext is the parent ran out of patience or ideas. The act was not a well considered disciplinary choice, but an act of frustration and desperation, even anger, all of which even spanking advocates — at least those who haven’t completely lost their moral compass — say a parent should never do.
Pediatricians, psychologists, behaviorists, and child development specialists: these are unanimous in the harm caused by hitting children, its failure to produce the results the people doing the hitting want, and its likelihood to cause far greater problems. Googling it returns 3.94 million results, and that’s just in English.
I don’t intend to go through all that research. I want to make a different case, one that somehow seems to have been missed: it’s not okay to hit people.
Children are people. People have a right to be secure in their own bodies. It’s not okay to hit people. It’s not okay to hit children.
In fact, it’s especially not okay to hit children for the same reason victimizing the defenseless is always especially egregious.
The case against corporal punishment in any and every setting is as simple as that, yet it’s just not a prominent argument. It’s as if — no, it is that society has so accepted that children do not have a right to be secure in their own bodies that the anti-spanking debate is framed almost exclusively in medical and sociological terms, never in moral ones.
It bears repeating: it is not okay to hit people; children are people; it is not okay to hit children. Logic so simple, a child can understand, but neither Americans nor their laws do.
There is no state where a criminal can be sentenced to corporal punishment, but with little or no due process, a child in school can. The Supreme Court ruled specifically that the 8th Amendment protecting criminals from such punishment doesn’t apply to children. States or school districts that allow for choice make parents and sometimes students choose between the child being hit and the child missing out on instructional time, i.e. suspension. Let us hit your kid (or you), or your child (or you) don’t get to learn something. That’s not only legal but ardently defended in many parts of the country. Parents who don’t trust public schools to teach history or science are fine letting those schools hit their children. In fact, many specifically don’t want history and science taught, but they do want the school to hit their children just like they get hit at home, and anecdotal evidence from the internet suggests it’s very common for students who do get hit at school to get hit again when they get home.
There’s an above-the-surface condescension among those who support hitting in schools such that reminding them that most schools manage to educate their students just fine without hitting them never breaks through. It’s gospel, sometimes literally, that “those schools” in “those places” are bad and probably full of “those people.” Take your pick filling in the other, but just like Americans tend to believe America’s education system has gone to hell but that their child’s school is okay, Americans who prefer educators hit kids tend to assume every school where students aren’t hit is hell hole where no one learns and gangs run rampant.
As for parents, they or whomever they designate can hit a child. Consider there are parents for whom their hand or an ordinary household object is not sufficient — no, they went to the trouble to secure an object specifically for the task. Needing an item made specifically for inflicting pain on a child is as sure a sign of sickness in a person as it is in the society that tolerates it. We have no way of knowing how many instances of hitting in the home even spanking apologists (or enthusiasts) would consider abuse.
But none of that ultimately matters: parents do not own their children. They should not be allowed to hit them.
Getting back to the rotten soul who beat a six-year-old in Florida and was caught on camera doing so, after telling the child’s mother that they’d call immigration if she didn’t allow them to do it, the state declared she had committed no crime: corporal punishment is allowed in schools in Florida as a matter of law, even in districts that have banned it. Child abuse, however, is not legal anywhere in florida, but that the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) say the beating was excessive didn’t sway the attorney general’s office. The Florida Department of Education is moving ahead with its own process that may result in the principal losing her license, but despite that and despite the principal having violated district policy, the district reappointed her to her position. Why not, when the principal and allegedly the entire district has never adhered to its own policy?
Don’t mistake the attorney general’s legal finding for a finding of fact: this adult beat that six-year-old. This video is disturbing. I couldn't finish it. Having watched some of the worst this world can do itself, I cannot watch this.
I recall when I was a kid overhearing a family acquaintance talking about spanking her child, who was quite young at the time, no older than five. This was someone who talked about spanking often, obviously someone who was proud to do it (it was bragging, is the only way to truthfully describe it). She was telling someone that the child wasn’t as afraid of a spanking from her as she used to be, but a threat of one from her dad provoked instant compliance. What stands out is what this person said next to whomever they were talking to:
“If it already doesn’t hurt when I do it, what will I do when she’s a teenager?”
This was not said facetiously. It was said with genuine concern.
This parent was concerned about not being able to hit her child hard enough.
If that disturbs you, you’re an exception to the American rule.
And if you think that parent’s preoccupation with hitting her child is distasteful but that the underlying act is justified, even sometimes, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you are not okay.
