Spanking, Questions and Answers about Disciplinary Violence

OLIVIER MAUREL

SPANKING, QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT DISCIPLINARY VIOLENCE

SPANKING QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT DISCIPLINARY VIOLENCE OLIVIER MAUREL

Table of Contents

Foreword ........................................................................................................................................... 4 Preface............................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 8 PART ONE ...................................................................................................................................... 12 1 A Brief History of Disciplinary Violence ...................................................................................... 13 2 The Nature of Disciplinary Violence and Opinions on the Matter ................................................ 21 3 Why We Must Stop Using Corporal Punishment .......................................................................... 27 4 How Can We Raise Children without Hitting?.............................................................................. 50 5 Why Is It Necessary to Ban Disciplinary Violence? ..................................................................... 67 6 What to do? .................................................................................................................................... 72 7 Question for the Author ................................................................................................................. 76 8 Questions for the Reader ................................................................................................................ 77 PART TWO ..................................................................................................................................... 78 World Geography of Disciplinary Violence by Continent and Country .......................................... 79 Europe ............................................................................................................................................... 80 Africa ................................................................................................................................................ 84 The Americas .................................................................................................................................... 97 Oceania ............................................................................................................................................. 105 Appendix I ........................................................................................................................................ 106 Appendix II ....................................................................................................................................... 108 Appendix III ...................................................................................................................................... 111 Appendix IV...................................................................................................................................... 115 About the Author .............................................................................................................................. 117

Foreword

This book is a gift to the millions of young people who are yet to become parents. A gift also and especially to every child yet to be born whose parents will have had the good fortune to read it. Without question, it will be appreciated as a rare source of essential and valuable information that refrains from laying blame; rigorous, yet presented in a way that is free of pretension. What is not apparent right away is how this guidebook allows us to open our eyes, to emerge from blindness and look squarely at this obvious fact which the taboo against judging our parents' behavior has kept hidden from us: children should never be beaten. We all knew this in our hearts, but early on when we were little we had to learn the opposite: that being hit was beneficial, that it was "for our own good," that it caused us no suffering, that it was just and normal to assault a weaker being than oneself while claiming it to be a beneficial act. Olivier Maurel rejects all of these lies, all of these habits which consist of looking for excuses, deflecting the truth, or hiding it. He reveals it simply, gradually, with every new question that he answers, clearly, without blaming the reader, but with no concessions or ambiguity. That is what makes this an innovative, clear-sighted, and important book, despite its compact size. As we proceed through its pages, we emerge little by little from everything that was instilled in us throughout our lives. By the end, it becomes apparent to us that reading this book has taken us to a place where we always wanted to go but were always kept from reaching. We feel relief as everything falls into place. We are finally allowed to take seriously what we felt so clearly as far back as our earliest days: that it is not right, and is even harmful, to hit a small person. I thank Olivier Maurel for collecting all this information and for providing it to us with such skill and simplicity. This book must be distributed quickly and as widely as possible. It would be a shame if any parents had to say to themselves, "Oh! If only I had read this book before my children were born." Alice Miller

Why is it that hitting an animal is called cruelty, hitting an adult is called battery, and hitting a child is called discipline? — Anonymous We cannot rid ourselves of an evil without first naming and judging it as an evil. — Alice Miller Treat children exactly as you would like children to treat you. — Norm Lee

Preface

In writing this book, I was constantly mindful not only of spanking as evoked by the title but the whole array of corporal punishments that children across the world suffer. It is important in a country like France, where anything more violent than a spanking or a slap constitutes child abuse, to realize that it took a century or two of progress to bring us to this point. In most of the world's countries, this progress has not taken place, and inflicting blows with a cane or other blunt instruments is considered normal and beneficial for children, just as it was in France one-and-a-half to two centuries ago. We also must never forget that in justifying and tolerating slaps and spankings in our own midst, we enable the justification of caning in those places where it is a facet of ordinary, everyday disciplinary violence. Children virtually everywhere are treated with a brutality that few adults suffer, and what is more, hardly anyone is concerned about it. All this violence unfolds on a dead end street of our consciousness. This is no accident, since, as we shall see later, disciplinary violence is itself the very cause of our ignorance and apathy in this regard. I would like to begin this book, if I may, by urging readers not to skip Part 2, even if the format of cataloging countries does not make for easy reading. Only this country-by-country presentation will provide a concrete vision of how children are being treated every day of our lives, all around the globe, not by torturers but by parents and teachers whom nobody advises of the consequences of such treatment. Just a few dozen years ago, it was possible for us to doubt the harm caused by subjecting children to corporal punishment. That is no longer the case today. The latest research on brain function unequivocally shows that blows received by children cause brain lesions and hinder their development. Internationally renowned neurologist Antonio R. Damasio endorses the idea that the way children are treated can account for a number of cruel and aberrant behaviors particular to mankind, which we casually attribute to "human nature." The World Health Organization, moreover, has taken a stand, ranking corporal punishment among the causes not only of adolescent and adult violence but also of a great number of illnesses. But very few people have read this report. It is therefore hoped that this book will sound an alarm not only for the benefit of parents and everyday citizens but also for governments, major religious authorities and especially Christian churches, human rights organizations, and of course groups dedicated to protecting children's rights, groups which, paradoxically, deal with child abuse yet often remain indifferent to ordinary disciplinary violence.

Since the first edition of this book in March 2001, there has hardly been any progress. Only one country, Iceland, has joined the list of eleven countries to have prohibited disciplinary violence at the family level. There was reason to hope for the same progress in Canada and Great Britain; however, in January 2004 and July 2004, respectively, these countries decided, despite the rallying of children's defense organizations, to maintain the right to use "reasonable" chastisement, which means virtually nothing was changed. With regard to schools, Delaware was the only state in the U.S. to ban corporal punishment, as 27 out of the 50 states had previously done. In the Punjab region of Pakistan, they are preparing to take the same step, though again it applies to school and not the home. Even in France, we have childcare professionals at the highest levels continuing to oppose legal abolition under the pretext that "public opinion is not there yet." But when do we expect it to arrive if none of our appointed defenders of children will get the ball rolling? On the other hand, in Africa (Cameroon and Togo) and Haiti, we are starting to see some groups that are committed to combating disciplinary violence. Also just created in March 2005 is the Observatory of Ordinary Disciplinary Violence, whose main objective is to make the reality and the dangers of disciplinary violence plainly evident in all nations of the world (see the Observatory's presentation in Appendix IV). In terms of our potential for self-awareness, the practice of corporal punishment also generates error and ignorance. Indeed, we continue to talk of man in the general sense without any consideration of whether the brain's integrity was preserved or was turned upside-down during the long and critical childhood years by blows received within the family and at school. We continue our discourse on violence without considering that the earliest violence children suffer is at the hands of their parents. Attempts to alert intellectuals, public authorities, or even licensed defenders of children to the toxicity of ordinary disciplinary violence and to the need for an outright prohibition quite often go unanswered, as if these concerns were completely incongruous and unworthy of attention. Whatever responses they do get are faintly condescending and dismissive: what possible bearing could some childhood melodrama have on the truly serious realms of politics and history? But once someone has studied the matter a bit, they no longer take umbrage. We know that the majority of people were hit, that they had no choice but to take their parents' side, that they were ashamed of the blows they received, that they look with derision upon the child they once were, and that for them to take their own past suffering seriously would make them feel they had lost their sense of being a serious grownup and their claim to membership in that segment of humanity--adults--which has the right to hit another. The expansion that this edition of Spanking brings to the first edition is three-fold. First, there are ideas that either came to me in response to the questions and objections of readers/listeners or which they suggested directly. I would like to give special thanks to the parents of the Internet discussion group Parents-conscients, whose questions and personal accounts never fail to inspire reflection upon the raising of children. Secondly, there is a great deal of information borrowed from new books on the scene, in particular the works of American neurobiologists who are currently involved in state-of-the-art brain research and whose findings confirm the toxic nature of physical punishment. Lastly, there has been much reporting from all around the world about the state of affairs regarding disciplinary violence.

Introduction

Whom does spanking concern? According to a January 1999 SOFRES poll, 84% of French children are hit by their parents. Only 16% of parents surveyed never strike their children at all. In a great many countries around the world, the proportion of children who are hit goes up to 90 or 95%, with children being hit both at home and at school. This means that virtually all of mankind has been subjected to more or less violent blows at an age when we are most fragile and impressionable. In many countries, moreover, the most commonly used punishment is the bastonnade (strokes of a cane, rod, paddle, whip, belt, vine, plastic hose, or electrical cord). There is no animal, no matter how ferocious, that inflicts this kind of suffering on its young in order to teach them. And yet, hardly anyone thinks twice about all the disciplinary violence that is advocated or tolerated, nor about its devastating effects.

Why is this book completely free of humor? There is a tacit agreement that we are supposed to talk about spanking with a good-natured and indulgent smile ("A good spanking never hurt anybody") or with a knowing smile ("Spanking? So this book's on the racy side, eh?"). But why all the smiling? In Costa Gavras' film The Confession, a defendant in the court of Prague is taken to the bar before his judges, wearing neither suspenders nor a belt. When he is ordered to place his hands on the bar, he lets go of his pants, which fall to his ankles, causing an uproar of laughter in the assembly. The defendant likewise begins to laugh, complicit in the laughter of his tormentors. Those who laugh at the blows they have received are like this unfortunate man, forced to take his distress lightly. By laughing with those who hit us thinking it was the right thing to do, and with everyone who hits children, we become their accomplices. One of the worst consequences of corporal punishment is that upon reaching adolescence or adulthood, each person comes to see those punishments as trivial and something to laugh at. There is only one true perspective on corporal punishment: that of the children who are terrified by it.

Why are children the only class of people permissible to hit? Over the centuries, masters could beat their slaves or servants. Husbands could beat their wives. Officers could beat sailors and soldiers. Prison guards could beat inmates. Most countries have abolished these usages. Adults are protected by law. No adult-vocational trainer would think they had authority to slap around an inept or uncooperative trainee. No one would think it was normal if a man or woman were to slap their mother or father who, due to age and diminished mental faculties, refuses to eat or to wash.

We do find it normal, however, to slap children for similar behaviors that are just as much a function of their age and immature brain. What justifies this blatantly unequal treatment?

Why are children treated more violently than machines? What would we think of a computer novice who, failing to master the functions of his PC or Mac, tries to get results by banging on it every which way? This is nevertheless what the human race on all continents has been doing for millennia to its own children, who by contrast are equipped with a cerebral organ more sensitive than any computer. And one thing that can be said for children, they are more sensitive but more resistant than computers are. Mishandled, a computer will break down. The user therefore finds it is wiser to consult the manual than to hit the machine. A child, for his part, if no vital organs are hurt, does not break down but continues to function apparently as normal. He even behaves like everyone else. And later we wonder, perplexed, what could have been the source of his incomprehensible violence.

Aren't there worse things than corporal punishment? Since early civilization and no doubt even today in certain non-literate societies, children are subjected to four major types of violence: bodily mutilation and deformation, sexual violence, infanticide, and disciplinary violence. These classes of violence do not have equal quantitative importance nor equal standing. The first (circumcision, clitoral excision, various deformations) relates only to certain societies. Sexual violence and infanticide are common but generally considered criminal offenses. The only violence universally allowed, even advocated, is disciplinary violence (raps, face slaps, spanking, caning, and other painful and humiliating punishments). A child can also be marked by other things besides parents and teachers' blows. Looks, judgments, and punishments of the "Write 100 times: I am a dimwit" variety can have devastating effects. But no other manner of wounding is regarded as an educational practice, which is why none is used on the same massive scale as hitting and other physical punishments are. No one, for instance, recommends calling children names, whereas books recommending a "corrective smack" or spanking are still to be found on bookstore shelves. The whole human race for the most part believes that hitting children is "for their own good" and that there is no way around it.

At the same time, hitting and other physical punishments are addressed directly to the body. And the human body reacts the same as the body of an animal when facing an attack. It sets off an array of instinctive reactions that nature has provided for the survival of the species and which drive us, like any primate being attacked, to either flee or defend ourselves. Later we shall see that when neither fight nor flight is an option, such as when a child is hit by his parents, the normally life-saving stream of hormones through the body becomes destructive. It makes no difference whether the blows are given with or without affection. The body does not take stock of intention; it takes stock of aggression.

Doesn't criticizing corporal punishment risk making parents feel guilty? Should we avoid criticizing domestic violence so as not to make violent husbands feel guilty? Road signs marking "Danger!" are not intended to "blame" drivers but to do the favor of bringing a real danger to their attention. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to the rules of the road when it comes to parenting. It is nonetheless imperative to point out the inherent dangers of corporal punishment and to try to suggest ways to avoid it. It is normal to feel guilty about hitting a child, as well as to apologize and look for ways to avoid doing the same in the future. This book might be able to help. That is its aim in any case.

Outline of this book The first major part reveals the history of corporal punishment, describing its various forms as well as religious and institutional viewpoints. From there, it is explained why we should do away with disciplinary violence, how it is possible to raise children without hitting, and what has been the experience of countries that have abolished it. This is followed by some ideas for learning more and taking action, along with two series of questions for the author and for the reader. The second major part presents a continent-by-continent, nation-by-nation "state of the world" with respect to disciplinary violence. As dense and overwhelming as this section may be, I recommend diving right in to get a concrete picture of the gauntlet of violent training that nearly all the world's children go through on the way to becoming adults. Once this sets into our consciousness, we are less astonished by man's capacity for extreme cruelty in light of all that people are subjected to during their most formative years. Lastly, there are some appended texts, including an appeal to Christian churches. The advantage of a book made up of questions and answers is that the readers may leaf through, choosing questions that interest them without having to follow the page order. The downside is that several different questions

may have overlapping or somewhat similar answers. It is hoped that those who opt to read this book from cover to cover will forgive the often inescapable repetitions which they will come across.

PART ONE

1 A Brief History of Disciplinary Violence

Does corporal punishment exist among our cousins the apes? Mother bonobos (the primate most closely related to us) do not "punish" their offspring. They simply keep them away from possible danger. Striking with the palm of the hand is not in their vocabulary of gestures either. If certain females mistreat their young, not mishandling but rather neglecting them, it seems to nearly always be because they themselves were abandoned or neglected when young. The only time they will intervene violently against their young is when the adolescents are pushing their younger siblings around. Hitting one's children is therefore not likely instinctive at all. It is a human behavior, culturally acquired through imitation. It is also a mistake to think of child abuse as acting like a beast. The animal nature we harbor has nothing to do with this behavior.

Do non-literate human societies practice corporal punishment? The few ethnological studies we have on children seem to show that certain tribes of hunter-gatherers practiced corporal punishment, while others did not, and that the latter were more peaceful than the former. This is borne out on every continent. One may suppose that insofar as their behavior was fairly close to that of the great apes, pre-hominids did not mishandle their children any more than bonobos do. But the more human societies have evolved and taken on behaviors far removed from innate behavior (perhaps especially during the transition to farming), the more duress humans must have been led to impose on their children, including painful ordeals (cruel initiation rituals, sacrificial rites), for which their biologically programmed behaviors evidently left them unprepared. Later on, the children who had suffered this treatment found it natural and necessary, due to repetition compulsion, to apply them to their children. In this way, the cycle of "disciplinary" violence ended up behaviorally programmed over the course of upbringing in the very brain of each child who had been a victim of it.

Did the first great civilizations practice corporal punishment? There seems to be not a single exception. From Sumer to Egypt to China, from ancient India to preColumbian America, from Athens to Rome, children were hit. Oral and then written traditions

universally came to postulate this behavior in proverbs that are found on every continent. The ones that had and continue to have greatest influence are the biblical proverbs attributed to King Solomon. For example: "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. But the rod of correction shall drive it far from him (Proverbs 22:15). As these proverbs were believed to be inspired by God, disciplinary violence was made into something sacred. Hitting children became a religious duty, and for some it still is. This quadruple seal (obligation to inflict duress upon children, repetition, oral and written tradition, sanctification) explains why disciplinary violence has for thousands of years been impossible to eradicate.

Is there support in the Gospels for corporal punishment? The Gospels do not say anything specifically about corporal punishment. But for Jesus, children are no longer flawed and corrupt beings who must be corrected. They are a model to follow and to be thoroughly respected: "Such is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 19:15). And for him who causes one of these little ones to stray, "better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). It is hard to see how these two verses could be compatible with the idea of punishing children (do models need punishment?), all the more so when it risks leading them astray by setting an example of violence. This revolutionary outlook does not appear to have registered. The Epistle to the Hebrews, long attributed to St. Paul, returns to the idea of a God who punishes because he loves, in reflection of earthly fathers. (Hebrews 12:7-8). St. Augustine, among the most influential Fathers of the Church, recalls clearly in the first chapter of his Confessions the physical chastisements he endured at school and how his parents would tease him when he complained. Yet he considers these chastisements to have been beneficial for him, given that school enabled him to find God. In the very same chapter, he rejects the notion that children could be innocent. He thereby imposed onto Christianity a belief in original sin that, in conjunction with the proverbs of the Bible, has served as extra justification for corporal punishment. Once educated about the effects of disciplinary violence, it is fairly easy to see why Jesus' words regarding children never really got through to people. His disciples, who presumably were raised with violence as Proverbs advises and carried it inscribed in their neurons as being the best method of instruction, were literally incapable of seeing that these remarks cast doubt on it.

Who were the first people to challenge the use of corporal punishment? Throughout the ages, there must have been men and women who did not suffer physical punishments and, being able therefore to judge them as unacceptable, disapproved of the practice. But it is in first-

century Rome that the earliest written expressions of disapproval for this custom appear. Quintilian (30100) and Plutarch (46-120) denounced the violence and even the perversity of schoolteachers. It is unknown whether their criticism had any influence whatsoever on their contemporaries, but it did have some in Europe during the Renaissance several centuries later.

Were children hit during the Middle Ages? Despite the assertions of some historians who see the Middle Ages as an exemplary period, numerous written and iconographic documents bear witness to the use of corporal punishment in the schools of that era. Teachers are almost always represented with rods in their hands. Concerning the family, there is less documentation, but everything points to children being hit in medieval European Christendom, like everywhere else. A few scattered protests likely had no impact on the practice. "It was a society that never loved children," historian Phillipe Ariès would say.

What did the Renaissance change for children? In the 15th and 16th centuries, there was a revival of interest in Greek and Latin texts, among them those of Quintilian and Plutarch mentioned above. Montaigne, raised gently by his father, was able to see the cruelty in academic customs and also denounced school corporal punishment. "How much more decent it would be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with the bloody stumps of birch and willows!" The great humanist Erasmus, for his part, wrote: "This would be better described as a torture chamber than a school. All one hears is the crackling of ferules, rods whistling, screams and wailing, ghastly threats." The prestige of these humanists probably led certain readers to question corporal punishment, from whence a slow evolution began.

What changes did the Reformation bring? Unfortunately for children, at the same time Greek and Latin texts were being rediscovered, there was also a movement towards a literal reading and application of Biblical texts--which on the subject of raising children prescribe hitting them above all! The idea that children must be beaten for the good of their souls therefore became widespread under Protestantism. Countries that were under England's influence for long periods of time are still deeply marked by it. In this domain, the New World has followed the Old with a faithfulness that endures even to this day in the United States and Canada.

What part did Catholic education play? From the 16th to the 18th century, even though corporal punishment was widely practiced, Catholic education was more moderate than the Protestant tradition. The main religious orders dedicated to teaching (the Jesuits and the Christian Brothers) and leading educational theorists, instead of referring to Proverbs, sought to reduce the use of corporal punishment as much as possible. Hence, they contributed to a new way of thinking about this subject when it came to schools. But they made no pronouncements regarding family discipline. The result: Having been beaten as children themselves, teachers scarcely heeded the calls for moderation, because repetition compulsion is more powerful than theoretical precepts of moderation.

What developments came with Rousseau? In Émile (1762), Rousseau advises tutors to "inflict no chastisement of any kind on children," though his condemnation was less than absolute; in a notation, he suggests that if a child gets it into his head to strike an adult, the blows should be "paid back with interest." In his Confessions, he talks at some length about his childhood and of the devastating effects produced by a spanking he received which made him into a masochist. His ideas on education have influenced a great many pedagogues (Pestalozzi, Froebel, Maria Montessori), whose work has oriented education toward a growing esteem for children. His autobiographical narrative also led a great many authors to recount their childhoods, often recalling things they had suffered. A new awareness was thus set into motion. Nonetheless, while 19th century literature mentions corporal punishment fairly often, most often these were punishments dealt by schoolmasters or cruel stepmothers. It would not be until Jules Vallès' The Child (1879) that an author would recall at length being hit by his own parents. Up until that point, scarcely 125 years ago--and keeping in mind that domestic corporal punishment had been the norm for millennia--this was a taboo subject. Talking about it was not prohibited, but just the same, nobody cared to do so on account of the same forces which today keep us from taking seriously the effects of disciplinary violence.

When did the state begin to intervene? In 1793, Poland becomes the first country to ban school corporal punishment. In 1834, for the first time in France, [Minister of Public Education] Guizot issues a Statute of the University, Article 29 of which states: "Students shall not be struck." This prohibition was certified in 1887. In terms of the family, however, it would not be until 1979 that a country, Sweden, outlawed the use of corporal punishment. Eleven other nations, most of them European, have followed suit, whether by

passage of an amendment to the civil code or a ruling by the country's Supreme Court. These countries are Finland (1983), Norway (1987), Austria (1989), Cyprus (1994), Denmark (1995), Italy (1996), Latvia (1998), Croatia (1999), Israel (2000), Germany (2000), and Iceland (2003). In several of these countries, the ban's enactment was accompanied by critical informational campaigns, extending to ethnic minorities, as well as measures to assist struggling parents. [NOTE: Since this book's writing, the list of nations which have abolished corporal punishment has grown to include Ukraine (2004), Romania (2004), Hungary (2005), Greece (2006), Netherlands (2007), New Zealand (2007), Portugal (2007), Uruguay (2007), Venezuela (2007), Spain (2007), Costa Rica (2008), and the Republic of Moldova (2009). Updated information is available at www.endcorporalpunishment.org.]

How do the courts handle cases of mistreatment of children? In France, their response has long been one of great indulgence toward parents, including in cases of fatal injury, up until 1914. Sentences remain light, as they do for that matter in cases of sexual violence. "It is only in the 1920's," writes Jean-Claude Caron, "that the prosecution of violence against children becomes well-established—light though the penalties remain." And according to Jacques Trémintin, "Violence is condemned only where you have a willful intention to cause death (by blows, lack of care, undernourishment)." But even then, he adds, "Judges and juries show astonishing leniency toward parents who murder." It should also be noted that barely two years after the Education Minister's notice in 1887 which bans school corporal punishment, France's High Court, as of February 1889, confers on teachers and tutors the same right of correction which parents are allowed. Slaps and backhands to the face were therefore tolerated insofar as there was no excess or risk to the child's health. This opinion was recently confirmed. A group of parents brought suit against a teacher who would pull his students' hair and ears and smack them. On July 7, 1982 The Court of Appeals in Caen rejected their claim: "Certainly, kicks to the backside, elbowing, ear-pulling or hair-pulling, clouts, slaps, and even blows with a ruler, if such violence is done by parents, would not be considered to exceed their right of correction, so long as there are no resultant medical consequences, nor any trace of evidence pointing to brutal excess, for that matter." Thus we have the Court of Appeals, quite significantly, granting teachers the right to hit on the very basis of parents' ongoing right to hit.

When does medicine begin to concern itself over the effects of children being hit? In the 19th century, medical examiners in France began to bring attention to children who were killed or gravely injured by their parents, as well to victims of sexual abuse. But those were extreme cases involving fatality, and their studies did not question the physical punishment that the majority of children were subjected to.

It was only in the latter part of the 20th century that a growing number of doctors, pediatricians in particular, advised against the use of these punishments. This was notably the case with Françoise Dolto. Today, the childcare handbooks that can be purchased in supermarkets generally advise not to spank or smack. But certain authors, often with leanings toward the psychoanalytical school of thought, continue to recommend hitting.

What is Europe's political stance? On June 24, 2004, the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, by a vote of 37-3, called upon every government in Europe to establish national laws completely prohibiting the corporal punishment of children. It states: "The process of eliminating corporal punishment requires explicit legislation linked to awareness-raising of children's rights to protection and promotion of positive, nonviolent forms of discipline."

Where does the Convention on the Rights of the Child fit in? Passed on November 20, 1989, by the United Nations General Assembly, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is a cause for great hope. Article 19 calls for all states to protect children "from all forms of physical or mental violence" And the Committee on the Rights of the Child, to which each nation must present a report every five years on what it is doing to abide by this convention, makes it clear that the nations must take steps to ban not only abuses subject to court action but the most common of corporal punishments: spankings, smacks, and face-slapping. The Committee defends the right to a childhood of physical integrity "without exception for any degree of violence toward children." One must "implement literally article 19, paragraph 1 of the Convention . . Even limited resort to physical force, a light slap for example, can be the first step down the path to veritable abuse." One member of the Committee emphasized this point to the delegate from Great Britain, "To draw an analogy, no one would argue that a 'reasonable' level of wife-beating should be permitted . . . The notion of a permissible level of corporal punishment was thus best avoided" (paraphrase of member comments offered in Committee report), as well as "other humiliating forms of discipline which happen too often within the family, at school, or in other institutions and which are not compatible with the Convention . . . The methods used to teach children should exclude all injurious, brutal, disrespectful or degrading treatment, as well as every type of humiliation or exploitation." With this "innovative approach to combating the violence suffered by children, the Convention and the Committee offer new hope of reducing numerous forms of adult violence that put people's safety at risk." Essentially, the hope is to "break the cycle of violence the often perpetuates itself from generation to generation in the name of tradition and custom . . . If society wants to solve the problem of violence",

including political violence given that "children subjected to such treatment don't often make good citizens . . . necessary action should be undertaken as soon as possible within the family", as a matter of promoting "an ethic of non-violence." It is a question of "educating parents to raise their children without violence and in a spirit of communication and mutual respect." To reach this goal, perfectly clear laws must be established. The countries with legislation plainly banning corporal punishment are sending a message to children. This ban has not brought about a flood of criminal cases, but it has served to educate parents. The law functions as a catalyst in doing away with the notion that corporal punishment is something normal. Recommendations to the nations include several approaches: 1. initiate studies on family violence, child abuse and child neglect in order to measure the scope and nature of these practices; 2. adopt appropriate policies and measures (prohibition of corporal punishment in particular); 3. contribute to changes of behavior by educating parents on the consequences of corporal punishment; 4. in cases of violence, conduct proper investigations within a framework of court proceedings adapted to children, with sanctions imposed on those who commit such acts; 5. take measures to monitor o child advocacy in court proceedings o physical and psychological readjustment o the social reintegration of abuse victims; 6. request technical assistance technique, particularly from UNICEF, the WHO, and NGO's. Member nations themselves are obligated, possibly without yet realizing it, to eventually enact a law of prohibition. And a good many of them have begun to take some encouraging steps. The signing of the Convention is therefore a great event in the history of corporal punishment and, perhaps, in the history of mankind, considering the toxic influence this type of punishment has had upon virtually all people up to the present. But if these laws are to be enacted and then applied universally, pressure from citizens and organizations will be crucial, because politicians are scarcely inclined to take unpopular initiatives with no electoral advantage. In France, moreover, despite Article 55 of the Constitution which states that a convention ratified by our leaders supersedes the laws of the Republic, a judgment by the High Court of France on March 10, 1993 (the Lejeune decision) maintains that "clauses of the Convention may not be invoked before the courts, being that this Convention, which creates obligations binding only to the states that are party thereto, is not directly applicable to domestic law."

What does this history of corporal punishment show? It shows that violence streams down from parents to children, generation after generation, and that this transmission could continue for a long time to come. In a country like France, it has taken about oneand-a-half to two centuries for the threshold of tolerance for disciplinary violence to lower from the bastonnade to slapping and spanking. But in most of the world, the threshold still goes beyond the bastonnade. At this rate, by the time children are given the essential respect they need, the excess of violence infused into society by the practice of corporal punishment risks destroying mankind and the planet. Political action is vital so that it will no longer be possible for anyone to be unaware of the destructive nature of corporal punishment in whatever form and so that parents have the benefit of help in the task of raising children. Until such time as the laws have universally banned this custom, each person can at least break the chain of violence with their own children and take part in initiatives for the abolition of disciplinary violence.

2 The Nature of Disciplinary Violence and Opinions on the Matter

What does corporal punishment consist of exactly? In addition to the blows struck against all parts of the body, either with bare hands or hands armed with all sorts of objects (sticks, rods, switches, rulers, wicker canes, paddles, chicottes, straps, belts, hairbrushes, electrical cords, martinets, whips, etc.), we have subjected children, and continue to subject them, to treatment of all kinds. They were in the past and perhaps even today are lifted by their hair (Ireland) or by their cheeks (France) until crying in front of their schoolmates, made to kneel on broomsticks, gravel, peas, foursided wooden or metal rulers, arms crossed and a Bible in each hand (France, certain religious schools at least until about 1970); they have been forced to remain still inside a circle drawn in the middle of the schoolyard, or better yet, confined in a wheel cage in the classroom during their lessons; they have been made to stand in the "ham" position (knees bent half-way, sometimes standing on one leg, arms crossed and a pile of books in each hand; they have been made to lick the ground; they have had their mouths spat into (France, 19th century). Today as in the past, they are pulled by their ears, hair, and noses. Held by the ear, their heads are knocked against the teacher's desk; they have hot pepper put in their eyes (Africa); they are enclosed in dark rooms; they are made to place their fingers on the edge of a drawer to be slammed (Morocco). The soles of their feet are beaten with a cane (Maghreb), or their legs are beaten bloody with a dried stingray tail (New Caledonia). They are denied use of the bathroom to the point where some will suffer from urinary retention or sexual troubles their whole lives. They are made to hit one another. They are shackled and chained at the feet, sometimes for several months, until they can walk no longer, and burning coals are stuck in their ears (Koranic schools in Senegal). Just a short time ago in France, there was an incident in which a schoolteacher tied up a child in a chair with scotch tape over his mouth. And as overwhelming as it is, this list is far from complete. No animal species has ever tried to "raise" their little ones by treating them this way. In countries where the cruelest torments are found, the arguments used to justify them bear a strong resemblance to those we use to justify spankings, smacks, and face slaps.

What are the stated goals of corporal punishment, and how has it been justified? The most archaic justification, yet one which is still current among certain Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is that children have wickedness, sin, and the very devil inside them, and that beating them is necessary to rid them of all this. Corporal punishment is thus good, safe and effective. This justification

has enabled even the death of a child to be sanctioned. The second justification, devoid of religious connotations, holds that a child is a small animal that must be trained and domesticated as such. Hitting is essential, though it should be in a non-abusive manner. The third one, more recently, recognizes that hitting is not the best solution but finds no way of avoiding it, or concludes at least that people living in certain situations cannot do without it. In other words, the way we view corporal punishment is evolving toward discredit and growing criticism of this type of punishment along with greater value placed on the child. This evolution is ongoing among opponents of corporal punishment, since some allow for other types of punishment ("time out," for example), while others think that all punishment can and should be avoided, even as firm boundaries are maintained.

What part does religion play? Religions are immensely responsible for the treatment allotted to children the world over. In the beginning, they only had to reflect the morals of the time and to theorize them in the form of proverbs. But these proverbs have taken on a sacred value, and even today a great many Jews, Christians, and Muslims consider a ban on corporal punishment to be an attack on religious freedom. Religions have also conveyed the notion that children are depraved creatures to be corrected and trained. The first people to contest the use of corporal punishment were cultured free spirits, whether under the Roman Empire or during the Renaissance. Based on the example of Montaigne, their sensitivity was most likely preserved by their exceptionally gentle upbringing, which allowed them to see the cruelty in how children were punished and not to consider it normal. From the 16th to the 18th century, Catholic pedagogues had a rather moderating influence. But it was the traditionally Protestant countries that in the 20th century were among the first to ban corporal punishment in the home. Unfortunately, in some countries (Great Britain and South Africa, among others), it is the Catholic and Protestant schools and communities who seek at all costs to keep corporal punishment whenever the state tries to ban it. In Muslim countries, apart from the books by Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen and a few films, there seems to be a scarcity of accounts describing the punishments that children endure at the hands of their parents and teachers. Those that have surfaced, particularly about the falakha and about Koranic schools, reveal a daily routine of abominable treatment. It would be good to have many more such accounts. Like the Christian churches, Islam in many countries opposes the abolition of corporal punishment; some Muslims, however, are beginning to put more stock in Mohammed's love for children than in the disciplinary value of the stick. There seems to be only one religion that is an exception to the rule: the Baha’i faith, which originated in Iran. The founder of this religion spoke out against the brutal punishments of the Koranic schools in the early 19th century and called upon his disciples not to hit their children. Curiously, Rosicrucians (disciples of the Rose Cross) also quite forcefully denounce corporal punishment, under the notable influence of Max Heindel (1865-1919).

Where do philosophers stand? In theory, philosophers are the members of society who should best be able to approach human truth and ultimate values. At the moment, it appears that no philosopher has a philosophy that is mindful of the fact that mankind as we know it has, for millennia, undergone such violent training right at the stage of highest malleability and sensitivity. It is stunning to realize that centuries of discourse on human nature have not taken into account how this nature has almost everywhere been hammered, distorted, slashed, and stunted by the most widespread method of discipline. Imagine if animal experts, considering horses or dogs that had been beaten by their owner to the point of making them pathologically fearful or mean, spoke in a learned fashion about these animals' aberrant behavior and attributed it to a corrupt nature, to their "impulses," without any misgivings about how they were treated when young. And if philosophers have this apparent blind spot, it is surely due to their having gone through the same training, which desensitized them to children's suffering of this type. It would not be going too far to say that all philosophy should be reevaluated once an awakening takes place.

What has psychoanalysis contributed? The position of psychoanalysts regarding corporal punishment is ambiguous due to the ambiguous position of Freud himself. He was a proponent of raising children strictly. In the course of his early research, he recognized at first the serious impact of sexual abuse on children and how it could lead to the development of mental disorders. To avoid implicating fathers in general and his own father in particular, however, he later reckoned that these abuses were "fantasies" generated by the illness. As a result, psychoanalysts have very little interest in the reality of inflicted traumas, whether it be sexual trauma or physical mistreatment. They often assert that incidents of abuse (physical or sexual) have been "fantasized" by the child, but moreover that children, who harbor an "infantile sexuality," are not innocent. Freud views babies as "polymorphously perverse" and ascribes to them a "death instinct" that makes them criminals waiting to emerge. Melanie Klein spoke of their "cruelty." And a work recently written by a collective of psychoanalysts states: "We know that the desire, so common in fantasies, to be beaten by one's father is closely related to this other desire, to have passive (feminine) sexual relations with him, the former being simply a regressive distortion of the latter." The child would ultimately "ask to be beaten in order to take pleasure in the equivalent of a sadistic sexual relationship." But psychoanalysis also involves listening to patients. And through this listening, a number of psychoanalysts, in particular Sandor Ferenczi and Alice Miller, have come to challenge Freudian dogma. Françoise Dolto, for her part, though she remained an adherent of psychoanalysis, often condemned the use of corporal punishment. Her daughter, Catherine Dolto Tolitch, unfortunately holds that "when moms and dads get angry and give a little smack on the hand, this helps to check themselves. There's a feeling that it should go no further than that, and it's actually kind of reassuring [for the child]". One has

to wonder if she would likewise argue that if her husband gets angry and smacks her hands, it is "reassuring." Aren't children violent by nature? Isn't a measured dose of violence necessary to subdue their natural violent tendencies? Like all living beings, children have energy within them. But it is a misuse of language to characterize this energy as violence, which means an abuse of force. The fact that a child's crying may be hard for parents to take does not legitimize comparing it to an act of violence, as some people do. For the child, it is actually an essential signal that allows him to communicate a need or a discomfort to the adults on whom he depends. And since his nervous system is incomplete, the child may be overwhelmed by his anger or his expression of suffering, so much that he cannot stop crying. In that case, he needs the arms of an adult to rock him, to calm him, to soothe him, to hold him, to reassure him. It is only very gradually that the child's developing frontal lobes allow him to have self-control. For a child, the act of biting is not usually a sign of violence. In exploring the world around him, a child will put everything in his mouth and close his jaws much like he clasps an object with his hand. So it is necessary to explain to the child that nobody likes to be bitten, while at the same time cuddling and reassuring him (as well as the bite victim!). A little girl whose mother had used this method got into the habit, rather than biting, of huddling up against her mother and telling her, "Mommy, wanna bite Louis." This tendency very often stops with the acquisition of language, thus supporting the theory that when children bite and roughly accost each other, it is their way of trying to communicate.

What is the opinion of medical doctors? Doctors in France have not made any collective official statement on the subject. But in the United States, the American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents, teachers, school administrators, and lawmakers to ban corporal punishment in every state and encourages the use of alternative methods. The Canadian Pediatric Society, which represents 2000 Canadian pediatricians, advises against resorting to corporal punishment and stresses that corporal punishment is especially harmful if used on infants or teens. As for the World Health Organization, its November 2002 report on violence prevention is unmistakably clear: "the use of harsh, physical punishment to discipline children are strong predictors of violence during adolescence and adulthood . . . parental aggression and harsh discipline at the age of 10 years strongly increased the risk of later convictions for violence up to 45 years of age. . . harsh, physical punishment by parents at the age of 8 years predicted not only arrests for violence up to the age of 30 years, but also – for boys – the severity of punishment of their own children and their own histories of spouse abuse." (p. 33)

"Corporal punishment is dangerous for children. In the short term, it kills thousands of children each year and injures and handicaps many more. In the longer term, a large body of research has shown it to be a significant factor in the development of violent behavior, and it is associated with other problems in childhood and later life." (p. 64) The report then catalogs the consequences of this violence: On children's health: Alcohol and drug abuse, cognitive impairment, delinquent, violent and other risktaking behaviours, depression and anxiety, developmental delays, eating and sleep disorders, feelings of shame and guilt, hyperactivity, poor relationships, poor school performance, poor self-esteem, posttraumatic stress disorder, psychosomatic disorders, suicidal behaviour and self-harm. Longer term consequences: Cancer, chronic lung disease, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, ischaemic heart disease, liver disease, and other health problems. The report goes on to cite the financial burden that comes from resorting to corporal punishment as a means of discipline: • expenditures related to apprehending and prosecuting offenders; • the costs to social welfare organizations of investigating reports of maltreatment and protecting children from abuse; • costs associated with foster care; • costs to the education system; • costs to the employment sector arising from absenteeism and low productivity. What it does not say sufficiently, on the other hand, is that harmful effects start with the lightest of blows.

What can animal experts tell us? Those who specialize in training animals long ago abandoned all forms of violence, whether in the training of dogs, horses, or wildcats. They point out, especially when it comes to horse training, that every act of brutality on the part of the trainer is experienced by the horse as a predatory act and that such a mindset should therefore be avoided if one wants to establish a relationship of trust with him. A child is different from an animal, admittedly, but the family to which we belong, i.e., primates, has flight instincts that are adapted to the fact that, vis-à-vis wildcats, we used to be their prey. Further on we shall see how hitting and threats of hitting, which automatically set off the flight instinct, combined with the fact that children are not exactly in a position to flee the parents who hit them, have literally destructive effects on their bodies.

"The recipe to make a dog vicious is the same one used to make a human being vicious: deprive it of affectionate bonds, keep it socially isolated, add a pinch of trauma, shake well, and you've got yourself a public menace." -- Veterinarian interviewed on [Channel 5 France] in early 1999. "For those who are still unconvinced that corporal punishment produces violent teenagers, try tying up a dog (especially a potentially aggressive one like a Doberman or a Pit Bull) and beat it regularly. In time you'll have an attack dog. Do we really want attack children?" Dr. Ralph Welsh, author of studies on child abuse.

3 Why We Must Stop Using Corporal Punishment

How do we know today that corporal punishment should be abandoned given its dangers? We now have certainty on the matter thanks to research on the brain's formation and functioning. We now know that at birth, a child's brain and nervous system are incomplete and will be constructed all through childhood. The brain of a newborn has one-fifth the weight of an adult's. The other four-fifths develops in the years of childhood and youth. This consists of neural circuits, the brain cells of which, by extending and becoming more intricate, increase the volume of the brain. It will not attain 70% of its weight until just past the age of two. This is why the joints of the bones in our skulls do not close definitively until adulthood. If the child is frequently placed under stress during this time, or for part of it, the brain's development may be disrupted. This happens to be the exact same time when physical punishments are imposed upon him. The most ancient parts of the brain are those that we have in common with reptiles and other animals. They regulate the functions that ensure the body's survival — blood circulation, digestion, respiration, bio-assimilation — but also emotions like fear when faced with danger. The most recent parts of the brain, those which are particularly developed in the human species, are the frontal lobes that enable reflection, knowledge, imagination, and control of emotions. For a well-balanced personality, emotions must be able to develop normally, and the brain must learn to recognize and control them. Now, when the developing brain is subjected to overly frequent stresses which cannot be remedied by fight or flight, the brain's capacities are diminished, development of the neurons is faulty, and some neurons even sustain lesions. As Daniel Goleman, who has summarized research on the brain's emotional components in his book Emotional Intelligence, writes: "[Being] beaten repeatedly, at the whim of a parent's moods—warps a child's natural bent toward empathy . . .These children, of course, treat others as they themselves have been treated. And the callousness of these abused children is simply a more extreme version of that seen in children whose parents are critical, threatening, and harsh in their punishments. Such children also tend to lack concern when playmates get hurt or cry . . . At such moments the habits the emotional brain has learned over and over will dominate, for better or worse . . . Seeing how the brain itself is shaped by brutality — or by love — suggests that childhood represents a special window of opportunity for emotional lessons." (p. 197-99). Another American neurology expert, Joseph LeDoux, explains in his book The Synaptic Self the damage caused when abuse coincides with emotional learning: "If a significant proportion of the early emotional experiences one has are due to activation of the fear system rather than positive systems, then the characteristic personality that begins to build up from the parallel learning processes coordinated by the

emotional state is one characterized by negativity and hopelessness rather than affection and optimism." In other words, given a frequent state of stress, the brain will establish connections in such a way that gives priority to detecting every sign of imminent danger. Such being the case, the pathways available for normal learning experience are atrophied. For his part, neuropsychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who specializes in trauma cases, states, "All human development is frontal lobe development. As parents, we are the mediators of the development of our children's frontal lobes. When we read our children stories, when we give them hugs, when we play with them, we are ensuring proper frontal lobe development. If a child is always frightened or terrified, if he is not caressed, if he is abandoned or neglected, his frontal lobes do not develop correctly and will never assume their function, which is to inhibit the limbic system. In this case, the frontal lobe is not sufficiently developed to help the person tune in to the present. He will be unable to record new information and to learn from experience." (excerpted from Jean-Louis Mahe's documentary, L'Expérience inoubliable, 1999). Finally, the world-renowned American neurologist Antonio R. Damasio writes in his book Looking for Spinoza (Heinemann, 2003) that severe problem behaviors among adolescents can be due to "a defect in the operation of neural circuits at a microscopic level," which "may have a variety of causes, from abnormal chemical signaling on a genetic basis to social and educational factors [emphasis added]" (p. 154). When asked whether the corporal punishments to which children have been subjected for millennia could explain the aberrantly cruel behavior that is the hallmark of the human species and generally attributed to "human nature," Damasio replied in the affirmative. Today we know that mistreatment and neglect have lasting effects, which can be seen using brain scanners, not only on the frontal lobes but also on the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotional memory, the corpus callosum (bridge between the two hemispheres), and the left side of the brain.

Is it really possible not to hit children? Practically all of us have learned not to hit adults whom we do not love, even when we are angry with them. If we successfully learned this, why would we not manage to avoid hitting our children, whom we do love?

Is corporal punishment truly necessary? There are other means of discipline besides corporal punishment. Even if sometimes in the heat of the moment we do not find or do not look for an alternative response, corporal punishment is never the only

solution, nor even a real solution. Those who advocate banning corporal punishment are not proposing that a mother who gives her child's face a slap be thrown in jail. They only want her to know that such actions are dangerous to the child. And they want just as much for society to help her raise her children nonviolently.

Is corporal punishment effective? Initially, children who are hit will often do what they are told, fearing the blows they could receive. But this is also their first experience of cowardice. Often, they will start up again the next chance they get: first experience of hypocrisy. In the end, they may take pleasure in defying their parents: first experience of provocation. Cowardice, hypocrisy, provocation: is this really what parents want to teach their children? It is true that striking a child can alleviate parents' tension to some degree. But for that they would be better off installing a punching ball in a room of the house, which the child will also be able to use to vent his anger, or punching sofa cushions. Frequently hit children are seldom more docile than children who are not hit. The seeming and very short-term effectiveness that hitting may have will very soon wear thin if it becomes habitual, and plenty of parents can be seen slapping their child around at every turn, without the least bit of conviction and knowing fully well the child will keep acting up.

Can the blows normally received by children cause immediate injury? Let us limit the discussion here to what is considered mild physical punishment, such as a spanking, a slap to the face, or a smack on the hand. Parents in France are warned of only one danger by the posters which hang in maternity wards: that of shaking a baby, whether due to exasperation over its crying or even perhaps in a spirit of playfulness. A shaken baby can lose its sight, sustain permanent brain injuries, and in some cases die. But they should also know that clouts to the ears can perforate the eardrum of a small child or cause eye trauma. A baby's arms can be dislocated if they are pulled roughly. While some see spanking as totally innocuous, believing that the buttocks were designed for that purpose, it is actually dangerous. The sciatic nerve, the coccyx, and the sexual organs may be hit hard, especially if the punishment is applied, as in many countries around the world, with a cane or a paddle. According to Jordan Riak, head of an American organization opposed to violence in education, "Dislocation of the coccyx and genital bruising as a result of punishments inflicted on the buttocks are not uncommon." Striking a child's hands can also have serious consequences: "The child's hand is particularly vulnerable because its ligaments, nerves, tendons and blood vessels are close to the skin, which has no underlying protective tissue. Striking the hands of younger children is especially dangerous to the growth plates in the bones, which, if damaged, can cause deformity or impaired function. Striking a child's hand can also cause fractures, dislocations and lead to premature osteoarthritis." (Jordan Riak, ibid.). With these risks in mind, one gets a real appreciation of the decision made by a Caen court on July 7, 1982, authorizing teachers to hit students on the hand with a ruler.

How many children are punished for a lifetime in such ways by their own parents?

Can striking a child bring about illness? The main thrust of a study conducted in 1995 of 300 young traffic accident victims was Dr. Jacqueline Cornet's observation that, along with a higher accident rate among children who were hit, there was also a higher rate of serious illness compared to other children. A similar study carried out in Hong Kong yielded the same results. Studies have shown that the stress hormone cortisol causes an inhibition of the immune system so that the organism threatened by the stressor can mobilize 100% against it. "Stress suppresses immune resistance, at least temporarily, presumably in a conservation of energy that puts a priority on the more immediate emergency, which is more pressing for survival. But if stress is constant and intense, that suppression may become long-lasting." (Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 168). A lasting stress, such as a fear during childhood of being hit, can cause a lasting disturbance of the immune system, thereby weakening the organism. Several American studies, moreover, "have found that stress hormones can leave neurons of the hippocampus weakened and susceptible to disease. So it is that long term stress leads the animal into a vicious cycle of neuronal death and even memory loss in some cases . . . a similar process could be involved in depression, post-traumatic stress, and even schizophrenia." (Le Monde, 5/21/99).

Can corporal punishment have an effect on infant mortality? Ferenczi, one of Freud's closest disciples, was already writing between world wars that "Children who are received in a harsh and unloving way die easily and willingly." More recently, sociologist Emmanuel Todd has established a connection between the mortality rates of children under the age of one year in Germany in 1850 and 1900 (much higher than that seen in France) and the extremely authoritarian German child-raising methods in the 19th century. Who knows what part corporal punishment plays in infant mortality in countries where caning is currently practiced?

Can corporal punishment lead to depression? Several American studies have shown a clear connection between the violence of blows received in childhood and a propensity toward depression and the consequences thereof: suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction. This connection is most likely due to the fact that the hitting, which is often accompanied by insults and intent to disparage, are not only painful but also humiliating and destructive to the child's self-image. The child who is battered and treated like a good-for-nothing will basically think he is good for nothing.

Can spankings make someone more accident prone? Incredible though it may be, this was proven in a quite rigorous manner by Dr. Cornet's study. This study conducted in 1995 of 300 young traffic accident victims at a trauma center clearly showed that those who had suffered the most accidents and the most serious accidents were also those who had been beaten the hardest, the longest, and the most frequently over the course of their childhood and early youth. Some other interesting factors emerged from this study: 1. A higher accident rate is perceptible even when subjects declare that they were hit only "mildly and rarely." 2. Use of hitting that continues well into adolescence is the factor which most exacerbates accidentproneness. 3. Hitting is of central importance; verbal attacks that are not accompanied by physical violence have less impact than physical mistreatment does. 4. It is youths that were most beaten who qualify themselves as "provocateurs," and not, as is commonly believed, the ones who "get away with everything." 5. The games preferred by the most beaten and thus most accident-prone are games that imitate the use of weapons, which confirms the relationship between violence suffered in childhood and a taste for violence in adolescence and adulthood. As early as 1961, two American psychosomaticians had noted that “accident-proneness is a psychosomatic illness that traces back to early childhood.”

Can corporal punishment incite a child to violence? 75% of French people think that school violence is due, more than anything else, to a lack of parental authority, which many think comes from parents' unwillingness to hit. Numerous studies, including American ones by Dr. Welsh (Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA) and by psychologists Ronald Slaby and Wendy Roedell, as well as the one by Marie Choquet of CNRS [National Center for Scientific Research, France] now show that "when a youth displays seriously violent behavior, we must investigate what kind of violence he suffered in the past . . . a strong link has been shown between all these forms of violence (self-inflicted, against others, and inflicted by others)." (report by Marie Choquet). The most aggressive delinquent is the one who has been beaten the most. And as Philip Greven reports, a positive correlation between parentally inflicted punishment and aggression in children is seen in more than twenty-five studies of children. To strike a child is to open up within him the path of violence, wide as a freeway, while blocking the path of respect for others. To respect a child is to make it apparent to him that respect for others is normal and natural behavior, and that violence is an aberrant behavior.

Can corporal punishment make a child insensitive? Psychologist Harold Bessell, quoted by Isabelle Filliozat, explains the effect of emotional negation this way: "Defense mechanisms are unconscious or automatic emotional operations that may be likened to reversible callouses, which form when the tissue is chafed or worn. A child doesn't have to tell his elbows, knees, or hands, 'You have to grow callouses or else you will blister.' When his emotions are wounded, he doesn't have to say, 'I will grow something that won't let that pain happen again or hurt as much.' Something simply grows, something that is like a callous in that it protects the tissue against further wear and tear, and also like a callous in that it is neither as sensitive, responsive, or handsome as the original tissue. A person who is all emotional callouses does not perceive the world fully, richly, or even adequately." It is this hardening, this armor, that children who are hit must have in order to survive. It is no great surprise that some of them have lost much of their natural capacity for compassion.

Does hitting children risk making them into murderers? According to an article by child psychologist Robert R. Butterworth in a journal of psychological and criminological research, child murderers generally come from families with parents who are either quite indifferent and neglectful or far too coercive and inclined toward brutal physical punishment. These children, whatever their environment, have a much degraded image of themselves. A study has found that of the ten American states where corporal punishment is used the most in the schools, five are also among the ten states with the highest crime rates, while the other five are ranked in the top twenty. Likewise, seven out of the top ten paddling states are among the ten states with the highest rates of imprisonment. The other three are listed among the twenty highest prison rates.

Can corporal punishment make a child into a masochist? Jean-Jacques Rousseau already answered this question 240 years ago in his Confessions, where he relates how a spanking received when he was eight years old at the hands of a thirty-year-old woman made him a masochist and forever unhappy in matters of love. The veritable taboo that surrounds corporal punishment has kept us from drawing conclusions from this account. We have been content to respond, as usual, with ridicule. Following the first edition of Spanking, I received several testimonials from readers, both men and women, who told me they had become masochists as a result of childhood spankings they received, meaning that they were incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure without it being linked to a spanking, real or fantasized. Considering the difficulty of admitting something like that, this number of letters I received is no doubt merely the tip of the iceberg. We should not be stunned, given how many children are spanked, that there are so many Internet sites for spanking enthusiasts. One of these readers went on to reveal that

seeing his mother, a schoolteacher, give spankings to his classmates left him with not only masochistic tendencies but also pedophilic tendencies. Spanking is sexual abuse, declared another of these victims. It is time for all the people who like to say a good spanking never hurt anyone to wake up!

Does corporal punishment predispose children to be victims of sexual abuse? This is what American writer Jordan Riak argues in his examination of corporal punishment: "Spanked children don't regard their bodies as being their own personal property. Spanking trains them to accept the idea that adults have absolute authority over their bodies, including the right to inflict pain. And being hit on the buttocks teaches them that even their sexual areas are subject to the will of adults. The child who submits to a spanking on Monday is not likely to say 'No' to a molester on Tuesday. People who sexually molest or exploit children know this. They stalk potential victims among children who have been taught to 'obey or else' because such children are the easiest targets." Although Jordan Riak gives no proof of this hypothesis, it rings true. "I was spanked, and I turned out OK!" What to make of this? This is usually said to defend corporal punishment or to suggest that it is hardly a danger that warrants prohibition. But is finding it normal to hit a person weaker than oneself or allowing him to be hit really a mark of well-adjustment? Are men of past times who thought it perfectly legitimate to beat slaves, or those today who find it normal to beat their wives, truly good models of humanity? Is their sense of right and wrong not somewhat distorted? As for their logic: is it coherent to hit children, as many do, to teach them not to hit? Corporal punishment alters the mind not only in terms of ability to see the obvious but also of one's sense of right and wrong. Hardly anyone realizes this because everyone was hit and considers it normal. The fact is that our tolerance of disciplinary violence is itself a sign of its toxicity. Here, for instance, is what a student wrote on an Internet discussion site: "I think abuse is wrong because locking a child in a closet or putting their head under water can be seriously traumatic. But giving them a few good slaps now and then, a few kicks and some licks with the belt or the broom won't do them any harm when they really deserve it. That's how I was raised, and I thank my parents for it. If you look at how kids act who've never been hit, then you know what I'm talking about." The student writing this believes she is being totally reasonable. She denounces what seems excessive to her, and she considers what she went through to be quite normal and beneficial. Today, we use the same kind of reasoning when we advocate spanking, "lesson teaching" swats, or smacks "on the hand" or "on the diapers." What we did not suffer, we denounce as abuse, while approving that which we did suffer or is viewed by our society as normal. That said, it is true that many people fortunately seem not to have been negatively affected by the blows they received in childhood. But as the strident "abolitionist" Jan Hunt once wrote, just because some

smokers are in good health and live to be a hundred does not make the use of cigarettes recommendable. Because "some children, like some smokers, are less harmed than others because of mitigating factors, such as the presence of other adults who treat them with love and care. To the extent that a spanked child is really 'fine,' it is in spite of, not because of, the punishments they have received."

Why do the majority of people who were hit consider hitting children to be completely normal? To understand this, it is helpful to recall what happened in Stockholm on August 23, 1973, as reported by Drs. Eric Torres and Virginie Grenier-Boley: At 10:15, an escaped prisoner, Jen Erik Olsson, attempts a bank heist at Kreditbanken of Stockholm. When the authorities intervene, he is forced to entrench himself in the bank, where he takes four employees hostage. He secures the release of his cellmate, Clark Olofsson, who comes immediately to join him. The police officers who surround the bank are a bit surprised by statements from those being held against their will: "We have complete confidence in the two bandits," "The robbers are protecting us from the police." After six days of negotiations, a deal is finally reached to free the hostages. And there, yet another surprise, the hostages come between the authorities and their abductors. They subsequently refuse to testify for the prosecution during the trial, contribute to their defense, and visit them in prison. One of the victims, having fallen in love with Jen Erik Olsson, ends up marrying him. This paradoxical behavior by victims of hostage taking, which has since been seen again in several hostage cases, is described for the first time in 1978 by American psychiatrist F. Ochberg, who gives it the name "Stockholm syndrome." He establishes a diagnostic test based on three criteria: "the development of feelings of trust and even sympathy on the part of the hostages for their abductors, a reciprocal development of positive feelings regarding their hostages, and the emergence of hostility toward the authorities on the part of the victims. Stockholm syndrome . . . can cause lasting or even permanent changes in an individual's personality, values, and moral convictions. Oftentimes the hostage will later adopt a permissive attitude toward crime." Even Baron Empain, whose captors cut off one of his phalanxes for the worst of motives, attributed to them a certain "kindliness" and emphasized the "understanding" they had shown him. Why bring up the Stockholm syndrome here? Because even though parents are not abductors nor children hostages, children find themselves in a situation of far greater dependency in relation to their parents than hostages have with respect to their captors. They feel and know with all their being that they cannot survive without their parents. If completely mature adults can have their lives permanently altered as a result of being in a state of total dependence on their captors for a few days, thereby developing irresistible feelings of sympathy toward them, imagine how powerfully difficult it must be for children to question their parents' behavior, even in the case of violent behavior. Moreover, they are not equipped to question the judgments that their parents lay on them. If they call them bad, lazy, and

stupid, then they must really be bad, lazy, and stupid. And the adults they later become cannot help assuming that there was justice in the blows they received and which did "a lot of good" for that bad, lazy, and stupid child they now are fit to judge, having become "reasonable" in adulthood. And just as hostages bear a certain hostility toward the authorities who freed them, the majority of adults who were hit feel great uneasiness regarding anyone who argues that the blows they received were not necessarily good for them. The psychological mechanism at work here is known as identification with the aggressor; it consists of identifying with the people by whom one is victimized, imitating them physically or morally, and adopting certain symbols of power which characterize them, particularly the aggressive behavior to which one was subject — in this case, disciplinary violence.

Is it true that the beaten will become beaters? As Alice Miller puts it: "Not all victims become torturers, but all torturers were victims." And if so many people accept the hitting of children, it is because they were themselves hit. But the effects of maltreatment can be, and fortunately often are, offset by the close presence of or encounters with people in the child's life whose affection, esteem, respect and understanding confer self-respect onto the child and allow him to heal at least partially from his wounds. This explains how some people who suffered violent physical punishment have been able to develop their intellectual and affective potentials, despite any physical and psychological scars they may bear. This ability to bounce back has been called "resilience."

Isn't it going too far to want light slaps and spanking prohibited along with caning? At first glance, there is no comparing the harmfulness of the former two with that of the latter. For at least seven reasons, however, we must not draw a line between light punishments and hard punishments: 1. Certain studies, particularly Dr. Cornet's, show an increased risk of accidents starting at the lowest level of hitting. 2. The person who begins striking a child — even lightly — is planting in their own brain a reflexive action that risks becoming the favored response for all conflict with the child. The dynamic of violence is one of escalation. And no one can know to what point their own violence will lead them. A study conducted in Ontario of 10,000 cases of maltreatment found that nearly all began with "reasonable" corrections. 3. It is impossible to set a judicial limit within which blows would be benign. Vague terms such as "moderate" or "reasonable" punishment, when they are used to define tolerable violence, make it possible to suppose that so long as the child's skin is not broken, the punishment is "reasonable." 4. Would we accept policemen having the right to strike us, even lightly, when we commit a traffic violation? The driving mistakes we make are certainly a lot more serious than children's follies!

It is perfectly immoral and illogical to inflict on our children that which we rightly refuse to suffer ourselves. 5. However forceful the hitting, the lesson that the child receives is the same: In the event of conflict, violence is a normal response, including toward someone smaller than yourself. 6. Striking wives or elderly people even lightly is not allowed. Why is it permissible to do so to children? 7. If the kind of swats or spankings that we want to have the right to give a child are truly light yet sufficient to make him obey, that means he is docile, and it would not have been so hard to find other ways to make him obey besides hitting him.

Can corporal punishment influence social and political life? Two researchers have argued, almost simultaneously but independently of one another, one from a sociological viewpoint and the other based on psychoanalytic practice, that familial authoritarianism and the physical punishments by which it is manifest have had a major political influence on 20th century conflict and totalitarianism. Emmanuel Todd, in his book Le Fou et le Prolétaire ("The madman and the proletarian"), has shown how the "child-rearing techniques" used in Europe in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century are partly to blame for "the European rupture of the system, in 1914, 1917, 1933, 1939. Four political and military tremors, revolutionary or fascistic, that we cannot separate from the general evolution of the mindset and techniques of upbringing. Everywhere the man of today is going mad with discipline." (p. 120). "The delirium within families and schools reaches its high point between 1880 and 1900. The point at which the political situation skates over the edge will occur between 1914 and 1933. At this time, the adults who comprise the politically active generation carry in themselves a long-ago experience of childhood, stamped upon their personalities, yet now archaic." "The characteristics of political extremism, which are tied to the practice of corporal punishment, are the need for violence, for power, and for submission" (p. 93). "In the belief that they are serving France, the proletariat, or their race," extremists "are resolving a personal psychological tension." (p. 112) Conversely, "it is the liberalization of disciplinary techniques" that brings about a decline of totalitarianism, with a time lag of some years (p. 320). Alice Miller, having observed the traumas suffered by her patients, undertook research on the disciplinary techniques used in Europe and on the upbringing of some of the dictators of our time. In doing so she found that Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, Mao, and, more recently, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic, turned out the way they did because their childhoods were marked by abuse and/or spent in an atmosphere of emotional coldness, with nothing or no one to compensate for the brutal blows and lack of affection. The lesson that these figures took away from their upbringing was that existence depends on dominating others. They succeed in doing so thanks to a normally developed logical intelligence that was nonetheless cut off from their emotions. Living among populations largely raised the same way, they appeal to the people's wishes. They stir them with demagogic speeches, cater to their desire for submission, and designate the scapegoats they need in order to vent their anger over the cumulative violence they suffered. For Alice

Miller, "the men and women who carried out 'the final solution' did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feelings of their own but to experience their parents' wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all their duties 'gladly,' of not being afraid — that is, at bottom, of not having an inner life at all." (For Your Own Good, p.81). This notion of an absent inner life has been confirmed by recent neurological research on brain functioning. Likewise, in today's society, "psychoses, drug addiction, and criminality are encoded expressions of [our earliest] experiences." (p. xxii). Conversely, "individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves." (p. 84).

Do accounts provided by Nazis' children and grandchildren reinforce the above analysis? Testimony from children of Austrian Nazis: "I spent my early childhood in my grandparents' home. They were highly respected in this conservative country. But their idea of child-raising was based on discipline, endurance, corporal punishment, and imperviousness to emotion. You had to be part of the elite, of the race of supermen, capable of suppressing all feeling if you didn't want to be cast as a weakling. . . There was no room for hugs or affection. Ideology was their compass." – Doris, age 40, sociologist "My father was terribly authoritarian. He had two sons before meeting my mother, and I remember their cries and the blows he would administer to them when they came to our home on vacation." – Birgit, age 36, psychotherapist (Le Monde, March 15, 2000)

Isn't it rather absurd to believe that a genocide could be traced back to the perpetrators' upbringing? It does seem absurd when one is unaware of the seriousness and multiplicity of the effects of disciplinary violence. The factors which combine to make genocide possible are one community's depth of hatred for another, the rise to power of a particularly determined minority capable of giving orders and organizing the massacre, and the active or passive participation of a large segment of the population who agrees with the genocide or does not obstruct its perpetrators. Yet all these conditions can be realized far more easily with a population subjected to a violent mode of upbringing. Accumulated rage from the blows received in childhood will naturally seek scapegoats on which it can be focused. Mental and moral confusion caused by the hitting will make minds more susceptible to the

most outlandish rhetoric and thus makes it easier for extremists to attain power. And trained submission to violence has formed masses of order-followers ready to obey, docilely or ferociously, the order to massacre their fellow human beings "for the good" of the community. Rwanda would be a good illustration of this mechanism. Some years prior to the genocide, the head of an association that visited several regions of the territory amid the population studied the particulars of mothering and the way children were raised. She found that the mothers, who carry their babies upon their backs, managed to obtain cleanliness from their weeks-old children by hitting them the moment they soiled themselves. "After a few spankings, the child who has an urge to pee cries in advance, knowing that he will receive punishment. When the mother hears him crying, she takes off his loincloth and has him urinate." She adds: "This upbringing whereby the parents gain at the child's expense, produces very disciplined and obedient children, but who are also passive and lost as soon as they are outside their habitual way of life. These children grow up to be relatively submissive, passive and fatalistic adults." Françoise Dolto, in her book La difficulté de vivre [The Difficulty of Living], had analyzed these effects, eight years before the genocide, showing that children, who have an incomplete nervous system, cannot hold in their excrements before the age of at least nineteen months for girls and twenty-two months for boys . . . "If they do, it is only by transplanting themselves onto their mother's mood, denying their own nature of being. . . The child thus thwarted, his rhythms disrupted . . . will never know what he wants to do . . . He will always need an external law, with external appeals and injunctions, to tell him what he must do. Since he has begun life with no knowledge of himself—his mother was the one who knew for him . . . Children raised this way can be seen trying to stick together with groups in their youth, carried by a group in which they are only a small element, like a child in the arms of an adult giant. Now they know what they want: they want what the pack wants. And schools make no attempt to change this initial formation; they do not try to get each person to think in their own way. Everyone must know, think, and speak the same. (La Difficulté de vivre, pp. 173-74). As it happens, in Jean Hatzfeld's book on the Rwandan genocide, Machete Season, which is compiled from interviews with a group of men who took part in the killing, one main fact which stands out is that the killers were driven mainly by obedience and social conformity at least as much as by Hutu hatred for Tutsis passed down from their parents during early childhood. There are multiple quotations that reverberate with the writings of Françoise Dolto: "We obeyed on all sides, and we found satisfaction in that." (p.16) . . . "I admit and recognize my obedience at that time" (p. 48) . . . "Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it, even to an animal. But if you must obey the orders of the authorities, if you have been properly prepared, if you feel yourself pushed and pulled . . . you feel soothed and reassured. You go off to it with no more worry." (p. 48-49).

"When you have been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors. . ." (p. 71) "We had first of all to obey our leaders . . ." (p. 142) "We were taught to obey absolutely . . ." (p. 174) Jean Hatzfeld also focuses on "the power of social conformity in situations of fear and crisis" (p. 224) "In the tumult of killings, stepping aside is not viable for a person . . . Being alone is too risky for us. So the person jumps up at the signal and takes part, even if the price is the bloody work you know." (p. 22627) "But when everyone began getting out their machetes at the same time, I did so too, without delay." (p. 233). Taken along with the fact that the halls of learning in Rwanda are also quite brutal and the routine use in this land of the chicotte (which is wielded much like a machete), we have an explanatory factor that should not be ignored. Namely, beyond the trained submission and conformity underscored above, it is from childhood thrashings that a child learns the same violent gesture by unconscious imitation. They also diminish his ability to feel compassion, an ability which is only learned through the compassion received oneself in early childhood. All these ingredients are quite likely to enable a genocide, given the right set of social and political circumstances. As one survivor of the genocide put it: "Genocide is a poisonous bush that grows not from two or three roots but from a tangle of roots that has moldered underground where no one notices it." (p. 90) It is perhaps by digging down to the killers' childhoods that we would hit upon this "tangle of moldering roots."

Could the violence in the suburbs of France be related at all to corporal punishment? All kinds of factors are cited as causing this violence, but almost never mentioned is the initial violence most children suffer from a very early age at the hands of their parents, who are their role models. It is plain to see, nonetheless, that parents are hitting their children in these suburbs just like everywhere else, and even more so. The families who live in the suburbs often belong to ethnic groups in which corporal punishment is traditionally practiced. They are often natives of Africa, a continent where caning is rampant. Parents may keep up the practice, which means this violence is having the same effect on their children as we have seen above. Or they might give up this manner of discipline for fear of being reported to social services ("9-1-1 syndrome"), and since they have never known any other form of discipline, they now find themselves at a loss as to how to raise their children. "When I was little, I had hot pepper put in my eyes to settle me down. Here, we're told we can't do that. So instead of finding a happy medium between the two cultures, we've thrown up our hands. And nowadays, our thirteen-year-

olds are starting to turn into bandits." (Comments of a mother from a city in the Essonne district, Le Monde, 11/14/2000). Either way, whether it's violence or no boundaries (usually accompanied by violence as well), the result will be violence against oneself (drug abuse, for example) or against others.

Does corporal punishment make children obedient? Spanking, or sometimes just fear of a spanking, often gets a child to obey for the moment. Sometimes in the long term as well: certain children give in to fear and decide to tow the line. But for many other children, repeated slapping and spanking has a hardening effect and leads to reactions of bravado and defiance, especially in front of friends and siblings in whose eyes, above all, they must not look weak. When a parent is confronted with the child's "Didn't hurt!" they increase the number and forcefulness of the smacks. To keep on spanking in such conditions is, as they say, "throwing a bucket of gasoline on a fire." And as the child gets older, the violent relationship will only get worse.

Does corporal punishment improve academic learning? All indications seem to be that the opposite is true. Teachers certainly know that battered children have a harder time of things than their peers. And there would be little reason to suppose otherwise. How clear and unimpeded would an adult's mind be if he had to perform a task under the threat, should there be any mistakes or resistance, of being rushed at and hit by an 11-foot-tall giant? This is exactly the situation which adults are now placing children in. Besides, the majority of people who were hit as children have for the most part forgotten what the blows were intended to teach them. There was an experiment shown on television where a group of students have to take a series of tests while wearing a wrist bracelet that will deliver, they are told beforehand, a mild electric shock for each error they make. Everything is going fine for several minutes as the students go through the tests. But as soon as one of the students lets out a yell as if feeling the pain of the punishment (this person was actually a confederate in the experiment and wasn't really being shocked), the others became slower in their work and started making mistakes. The explanation presumably is the same as research conducted at Yale University suggests: "The emotional brain [where fear presents itself] can put the prefrontal cortex, the most advanced part of the cognitive brain, 'off-line' . . . When affected by major stress, the prefrontal cortex no longer responds and loses its ability to direct behavior" A comparative study done in the U.S. between 46 states during the 1996-1998 school years, found that the best university grades were achieved in those where school corporal punishment is banned, while those which allow it had the worst.

Is corporal punishment effective in teaching morals and appropriate behavior? Who hasn't seen a father or mother smack their child to teach them "not to hit those who are smaller"? What can a child, whose behavior is based on imitation more than anything else, take away from such a self-contradictory lesson? The exact situation in which the child now founds himself is what psychologists call the double bind. This means he is caught between two conflicting commands, like in a short circuit. The parents' verbal message is "Don't hit someone smaller than you" or "Don't do something to someone else that you wouldn't like done to you." But the message of their actions, the one which the child takes in through imitation, whether he realizes it or not, is "Don't hesitate to hit those who are smaller, like I do!", "Do to others what you don't like being done to you." Likewise, is an impulsive child who makes his parents afraid that he'll cross the street without looking going to control his impulses better after being shaken or hit? It's doubtful. It is often said that spanking a child is a way of "laying down the law" and teaching him boundaries he needs to be aware of. It is a strange form for a civics lesson to take, considering that the law consistently declares such acts illegal, that it's not allowed to be done to other adults, and that it is condemned by the Convention on the Rights of the Child which every country has signed, as well as by the penal code, even if in practice it is allowed to go on. The only law which smacking teaches is the law of mightmakes-right, which we certainly don't want to be the rule for society. And how are we teaching boundaries by smacking, which itself is a violent intrusion into the child's territory, an encroachment on his safety zone, and a method which is very difficult for a great many parents to keep within reasonable limits?

What natural instincts are engaged by striking a child? The use of physical punishment to make a child obey assumes that he will "understand" and that the prospect of being punished again will lead him not to repeat the undesirable behavior. There is an assumption that the only factors at play are the unpleasantness of the punishment, the child's intelligence, and his will to avoid further unpleasantness. But there is more to a child than a punishmentsensitive body, intelligence, and will. In striking children, we interfere with the natural instincts that we have in common with other primates. Imitation instincts, which can be seen in the child starting from the earliest hours of life, are obviously the first involved. And thanks to research carried out in 1992 by Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parme, we know that the human brain contains certain neurons, called "mirror neurons" for the role that they play. When we observe a behavior, whatever it may be, they turn on as if we were copying the same actions. Observation of an attitude or gesture paves the way in our brain for the imitation of it. In other words, the brain of a child seeing his mother or father strike him is activated just

as if he himself were striking someone. To hit a child primarily teaches him to hit. It opens up pathways of violence in his brain. And it must be noted that disciplinary violence absolutely is violence by the strong against the weak. Put another way, without even teaching the child to defend himself, it teaches him to be attack weaker beings. From experiments detailed in psychologist Albert Bandura's book, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis, we also know that for violent behavior to be passed down effectively, three conditions are required: First, that the children love and admire their role models; second, that the role models succeed in modifying the children's behavior; and finally, that they have gotten the children to believe that the violent punishments were deserved. These three conditions are satisfied most often in parent-child relationships. In striking a child, we are not conveying civilization, but its opposite: violence. Self-protection instincts are what make an animal halt, run away, or fight when danger presents itself. An experiment shown in a film featuring Henri Laborit, My American Uncle, gives a very good illustration of this subject. A rat is placed inside a double cage and given mild electric shocks though the cage floor; it is perfectly fine, provided that at the moment of each shock it is able to run to the other compartment, from which it can return to the first compartment when the next shock comes. Its tension levels stay the same, and if dissected its organs would show no lesions. If a second rat is now placed in the cage, each may think the other rat's presence is causing the electric shocks, so they may start fighting. This experiment can go on for a long time without causing the rats any harm. But if another rat is placed in a cage and kept from running away, it cowers and becomes tense, and dissection will reveal digestive system lesions. The stress hormones that normally serve to spur the animal to fight or flight have attacked its body, because their usual role was obstructed. We know today that stress hormones attack even the neurons. So . . . what is the current situation with a child being hit by his parents? It is the same as that of the third rat, able neither to flee nor fight back. The stress triggered by being hit and the fear of being hit attacks his body and can cause his brain to have the microlesions that Damasio discussed [see above, 7th paragraph from top]. Bonding instincts, identified and studied by the English psychoanalyst [John] Bowlby during the fifties, are also affected by parental violence. There can even be a veritable perversion in the psyche connecting love to violence. Plenty of visitors on sado-masochism websites attest that thanks to childhood spankings, they have trouble achieving orgasm without being hit. Domestic violence fairly often stems from parental violence as well. And it is a safe bet that disciplinary violence is the source of a considerable portion of violent acts committed by boys against girls. In other primates and mammals, submission instincts have been observed, which are actually an extension of the bonding instinct. So strong is their need for social bonding that young apes will submit to the dominant male despite the frustrations they suffer at his hands. Using disciplinary violence to

make children obey can lead them to acts of provocation, but more often it reinforces this innate tendency to submit. Stanley Milgram's experiments found that two-thirds of people are capable of torturing their peers to death out of simple acceptance of a recognized authority. And contrary to what may be believed, disciplinary violence does not teach obedience to the law so much as to a violent authority perceived as an incarnation of parental authority. Which is to say that those who have been subjected to it are driven to obey a neighborhood bully, or for that matter a Hitler, a Saddam Hussein, or a Kim-Jong-Il, with all the levels of collective violence this can entail. So, far from having a marginal and superficial effect, the smacks a child receives from his parents reach the most central and archaic areas of his brain. We think we are hitting him on the buttocks, face, hands, or back, when in fact it is a bit like launching a smart missile that lands right in the child's brain, however unwittingly or contrary to our intent.

What messages do children receive from being hit? To strike a child is to make him accept a whole range of equally dangerous ideas: • I have the right to hit you. • I have good reason to hit you. • By hurting you, I am doing you good. • You think I'm hurting you, but I'm doing you good. • You are wrong to think I'm hurting you. • You are not capable of understanding what I'm doing to you. • Your senses and your feelings have deceived you. • You should not trust yourself. • Don't listen to the voice deep down inside of you. • Listen only to the voice of your mother/father. • That is how you know what to do. • Suffering is good. • Making someone suffer is good. What a child learns is not so much what we are trying to teach him as the manner in which we teach him. This is the cornerstone on which he will form his life principles. In the lessons that children take from being hit, it is not hard to recognize the worst principles of Machiavellianism, cowardice, and cruelty: • Those who are bigger and stronger are entitled to beat on the smaller and weaker. Might makes right. • Those who are small and weak must submit to violence. • Children must be hurt for their own good. The end justifies the means. • You can hit somebody for their own good.

• • • •

When you love somebody, you have the right to make them suffer. To hurt them is to show how much you care. I should be hit because I am bad. Most children get hit, so most children must be bad. Pay no mind to the suffering of those who are hit.

These principles are etched are the child's innermost being and will inspire his adult behavior without his even knowing where they came from.

Is it true that some children "ask for a spanking"? Defenders of this type of punishment often have in mind a bratty, insolent, confrontational child who seems to do everything in his power to get a spanking: "He was asking for it!" It's true that children exploring the range of possible behaviors naturally try to see just how far they can go. If you haven't been able to convince him that such and such behavior is prohibited, it is natural and to some degree healthy for him to try doing it again. Do we adults not do our share of stepping over the line ourselves? If you react once again without the necessary force of conviction, the child may make a game out of getting a rise out of his mother or father. After a certain age, and not long after entering the social realm of children his age, he may say to himself: "If I don't do it, I'm chicken." As parents, we can be legitimately exasperated by such behavior, but that is no reason for a spanking. We should rather examine what about our attitude brought about this behavior. For a child who has been spanked before, the result can also be something else entirely: if spanking triggered feelings of sexual pleasure in the child, he could simply be trying to repeat the experience. A reader once told me that he would ask his mother to spank him for this reason, having seen her give spankings to his classmates in grade school where she was a teacher. But for the most part, young children, if they haven't become hardened to the blows, and often even when they have, are intensely fearful of spankings and physical punishments. Many children are willing to tolerate anything in order to avoid them. In June 1999, in the American state of Utah, a child was discovered inside a car nearly dead from heat exposure. His parents had given him a choice between getting spanked and spending an hour enclosed in their car parked out in the sun. The boy didn't think twice about it. In Africa, a massive number of children have stopped going to school and won't go home either for fear of the beatings they receive. This has become a problem for society in many countries. Churchill, a man whom few would accuse of cowardice, recalled with horror the two years he spent at a school where corporal punishment was practiced. Balzac compared the fate of the student about to be beaten to that of a condemned man going to the place of execution, and he knew whereof he spoke. The

defiance and provocation of some children toward their parents, having gotten used to spankings after so many, should not lead us to think that this is the case for the majority of children. If everything above is true, how is it that we are not practically all in the hospital or in jail, since nearly all of us were hit? Aren't most people pretty much normal? As stated earlier, the effects of disciplinary violence are often offset by the presence in victims lives of "clear and compassionate witnesses" such as Alice Miller speaks of, who enable these children to retain their integrity despite what they endure. Children who have maintained their balance even though they have been hit, without repeating this behavior themselves against anyone, especially their own children, generally owe it to the looks of kindliness, affection, and esteem from an adult, perhaps a parent, neighbor, or teacher, who has enabled them to remain their true selves. They owe it also to their capacity to rebel against what they have suffered, as a study by Hunter and Kilstrom has shown. But this capacity for positive rebellion (as opposed to the rebellion that leads, say, to delinquency) develops more readily in those who have known the esteem of even just one person than in those whom nobody has taught that they did not deserve what was inflicted upon them. The same study found that for children just to understand that what they had suffered was undeserved lowers the risk that they will end up harassing or attacking others. What's more, the effects of disciplinary violence will obviously vary according to the level of violence inflicted. The highest level is that which produces serial killers and, from a political point of view, the taking of power by mass-murdering dictators and the fulfillment of their intentions. The level just below that causes various pathologies, accidents, violence against women, blatant child abuse, common crime and delinquency. And at its lowest level, disciplinary violence carries, as a sort of minimum guaranteed result, the repetition of ordinary disciplinary violence (smacks, face slaps, and spankings) or the justification of such forms of discipline.

Do children by nature need to be punished? A newborn is completely innocent. While he is animated by energy like all living beings, he harbors no original sin, no "death instinct," no "fundamental violence." The future Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Landru, Dutroux and any of the worst criminals you can think of were once innocent babies who could have become wise men, heroes, or saints, or maybe better yet, ordinary men capable of simple humane feelings. The newborn wants merely to live, but cannot on his own. He is totally dependent on his parents or those raising him. "The connection to his parents," says child psychiatrist Alain Vanier, "is what the child values above all, more than his own physical integrity." The development of his personality takes place in interaction with the personalities that surround him, foremost being his mother. Each reaction to the child from the family circle, whether positive or negative, marks the child, is imprinted upon him, and he reacts to it according to his own temperament. Daniel Stern in Diary of a

Baby notably shows how a baby, yelled at or hit for the first time for touching something she didn't know to be off-limits, is frightened by what is happening to her without understanding the reason for it. So she goes back to her exploration "to clarify the confusion" and "evoke a different response this time." The adult now thinks the baby is trying to be provocative and aggressive. There is a risk that this false interpretation may then "become the infant's and later the child's official and accepted one." It is thus possible that the baby "may come to see herself as aggressive, even hostile. Someone else's reality has become hers. Thus, the failure of intersubjectivity can introduce a lifelong distortion."

Why should human rights organizations concern themselves with abolishing corporal punishment? "Whipping someone with a cane is cruel, inhuman and degrading. International standards make clear that such treatment constitutes torture. Such a punishment should have no place in today's world," Amnesty International declared in 2002 with regard to the punishment by caning of immigrants in Malaysia. These remarks could not be more correct. But how is it that no international organizations are making similar statements when children are subject to legal beatings in the majority of the world's countries, including in the schools of 22 U.S. states? What explains this age discrimination whereby people take action, rightly so, in defense of adults being beaten, yet do nothing about children being beaten the same way by their parents or teachers?

Why should feminists concern themselves with abolishing corporal punishment? The feminist movement has been a pioneering force in the struggle against family-related violence (sexual abuse, rape, conjugal violence, child abuse recognized as such) but so far it doesn't seem that they have tackled ordinary disciplinary violence. This is the compost, however, in which child abuse germinates, as well as much adult violence and conjugal violence in particular. Many mothers without realizing it adopt behaviors that they sincerely think are good discipline, but which risk leading their sons to behave in that way toward their wives or girlfriends. And in hitting their daughters, they run the risk that they will grow up to accept being beaten by their husbands "for legitimate reasons," as many Indian women have, for example, quite simply because they consider themselves to have beaten by their parents "for legitimate reasons" — the same which cause them to beat their own children. Wouldn't it be true to their calling for feminist groups to make the passage of a law specifically against disciplinary violence one of their goals? As long as disciplinary violence is not formally banned and we do not help parents raise their children non-violently, domestic violence will have a bright future ahead.

Why should environmentalists concern themselves with abolishing corporal punishment? Children are part of nature, and if we are protecting animals, it seems just as logical to make sure that children are not subject to brutality. It is not in any animal's nature to brutalize its young to discipline them. So when we do it, we are going against our nature. Most of all, children hit by their parents from an early age come to adopt their parents' point of view. They think they are actually to blame, that there is good reason for hitting them. The blows have an effect of self-denial upon them. They lose touch with their emotions, which make up their inner compass and their very being. Later they look back with contempt or derision on the children they were. Mistrustful of themselves, and having therefore lost much capacity for simply being glad to be alive, they need something to fill that void in order to survive, and the fillers sought out the most, along with various drugs, are appearance, material possessions, and power. There is nothing like the collective quest for these substitutes to create an environmentally destructive society, bent on possessing, on consuming, and on gaining power. The eagerness to possess ever more useless objects, the race to be rich and powerful cannot help but destroy nature, which we are endlessly plundering and polluting without qualms. We can never protect life on this planet unless the violence generated by disciplinary violence comes to an end. We will be able to take the steps necessary to the planet's survival only if the pressure of fear fostered by our brutality diminishes and as many people as possible have the benefit of all their emotional and intellectual faculties. This is not the case when disturbances are being caused in the majority of children's brains by the way they are disciplined starting in childhood.

Why should churches call for the abolition of disciplinary violence? Banning disciplinary violence should in fact be advocated by all religions that are truly concerned about respect for all people, and especially for children if they truly wish for peace and the establishment of less violent human relations. But this should especially be the case with Christian faiths because of Jesus' unequivocal words about children, and the ethic of respect for others which is essential to the Gospels. No doubt they would have to make a public mea culpa for the way children were often treated in their learning establishments. But there is already precedent in similar mea culpae issued publicly by the Catholic church and Pope Jean-Paul II. With respect to the Protestant churches, the Ecumenical Council of Churches has begun, at least in Africa, to take fairly clear positions on the subject. Meanwhile, the Catholic church is for now content to

lament child abuse without addressing ordinary disciplinary violence, which is quite inadequate given that no one feels abuse has anything to do with their behavior. Included in the Appendices is a list of arguments that may be useful to those seeking to effect change in the Church's stance toward the issue of disciplinary violence.

Why is ordinary disciplinary violence hardly ever cited as a factor in teen and adult violence? In 1999, Claude Bartolone, then Minister of Urban Affairs, asked researchers at INSERM (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) and at the European Observatory of Violence in Schools to do a report on violence by children and teens. This report which was submitted to the minister and published in September 2000 and which analyzes the causes of this violence, concludes with 100 proposals for the prevention of violence worldwide. Of these hundred proposals, six concern the family, yet not a single one mentions the fact children spend their very first years within the family and that their first contact with violence, sometimes when they are just a few months old, occurs beneath the hand, whip, or belt of their own parents. Within the report itself, there are but a few lines to be found that evoke disciplinary violence, but they are most interesting: "Children who are victims of parental violence, and especially maternal violence, are at greater risk (with physical abuse and all the more so with sexual abuse) during adolescence for delinquency, psychosomatic troubles, academic difficulties, relationship troubles, and, once adults, for depression, suicide attempts, alcoholism, and marital problems." (Marie Choquet). Despite this disconcerting catalog of results from what we usually consider trivial and without consequence — smacks, face slaps and spankings from mothers, not one proposal was made to the minister by the researchers to combat this form of violence.

What explains this "oversight"? Experts on violence, researchers, scientists — all are people like everyone else. Often they were hit themselves. And as we have seen, one effect of disciplinary violence is to make people blind and deaf to the effects of disciplinary violence. Because the shame and humiliation of having been hit stays ingrained into adulthood, people make light of the suffering they experienced and are unable to imagine it having serious consequences. We also avoid thinking about those humiliations, and we are so good at it that we blame adult violence on every possible cause except for that one (in the same report is found a long chapter on the supposed "fundamental violence" of children). Disciplinary violence is linked in our minds to so many childhood humiliations that anyone who takes disciplinary violence seriously is not all that likely to be taken seriously by most people. Such is the placement of disciplinary violence, with both the individual map and the collective map, on a dead end street of our minds. It is a blind spot right in the middle of all our knowledge.

Man is an animal conditioned to violence from the cradle by his parents. And they further condition away his awareness that he has been conditioned. How long will it take for us to finally recognize this?

Is everyone capable of becoming Hitler? It is often said, particularly by Christians or those influenced by the psychoanalytic school of thought: "Anyone can become a monster. It doesn't take much to send the best of men veering into monstrosity and crime." This idea comes across as sober, vigilant, and realistic. I myself recall telling my students, after reading one of Jung's books, "We are all living with a volcano inside that can erupt at any moment." As important as this idea seems, it is false. It simply takes no account at all of what is most fundamental: the degree to which we as children were or were not conditioned to violence. A child who has suffered traumas of which he is not consciously aware, who has accumulated an enormous violent charge due to harshness or indifference on the part of his parents or to sexual abuse he has endured, can indeed become a hardened criminal, a "monster," a Hitler. A child whose integrity has remained intact throughout childhood, whose brain has not been unsettled by the caretakers he loved and respected, will never become a monster. If he does happen to commit a serious crime under the pressure of particular circumstances or by accident, it will cause him such remorse that he goes all out to make amends. In missing this distinction, classical humanism is merely an abstract thought with no relation to the reality of the conditioning that children suffer — and in fact conceals this reality.

But there are also some children who batter their parents . . . True. We know for example that in Quebec, 13% of teens physically assault their mother. But the study by Linda Pagani which established this figure by conducting a survey among a group of 725 girls et de 687 boys from different regions of Quebec, also shows "the existence of a link between the way parents handle discipline and conflicts and behavior towards mothers. If the adults yell, swear, or insult to assert their authority, the adolescent will tend to adopt the same behavior; if they have resorted to physical punishment (for example, a slap), the teen will use the same strategy to express his or her anger." In other words, it is likely that the majority of cases of battered parents stem from cases of battered children.

4 How Can We Raise Children without Hitting?

What principles are followed to teach a child without hitting? The principles are extremely simple and can be understood by everyone. It is only in putting them into practice that difficulty arises. The principle of non-violent upbringing comes down to three words: respect the child. The practical application of this respect is also easily defined: treat the child as we would want to be treated. The bulk of what a child learns, he learns by imitation as if he were a mirror, determined less by what we want him to learn than by how we act toward him. Do we want him to know how to love? Let's love him. That he know how to show affection? Let's show affection to him. That he respect others? Let's respect him. That he be patient and tolerant? Let's be patient and tolerant with him. That he never inflict violence once he has grown up? Let's never inflict violence on him. That he have an independent personality. Let's respect his independence to the maximum. Understanding this is within anyone's grasp.

What's the difficulty, then? The difficulty of raising a child, of course, comes from the fact that living with a child, especially one who has a lively and active nature, or if you are dealing with hardships, can be not just tiring but frankly exhausting. All the more so if you have several. And still more so for the mother (more often than the father) who is alone while taking care of them. The mother or maternal figure no longer belongs to herself, which can cause her great frustration, even though she loves her child. Current living conditions, moreover, while undoubtedly more comfortable than the living conditions of prehistoric huntergatherers, force parents into life rhythms that are stressful for them as well as for their children. But the challenge one faces in not hitting is tied less to these objective difficulties than to parents' history and to the fact that rarely will all their needs have been respected when they were children. Hence, it is likewise rare that they will spontaneously know how to respect all of their child's needs. As Alice Miller writes, "Only by facing up to the fact that we were victims do we have any chance of opting out of the exploiter-victim spiral and giving up both roles." We should therefore consider what are a child's abilities and basic needs and ask ourselves whether those needs were respected in our own childhood. Some parents don't know how to cuddle their babies because they themselves were not cuddled. Or they neglect their child because they themselves were neglected. It is good to be aware of such things and, if necessary, to get a psychologist's help to get beyond this difficulty and not cause our child to suffer the same deficiencies in the present that we suffered in the past.

What are a child's basic needs? These can be identified simply by recalling what the mother's body provided to the child before birth. A warm surrounding environment? He needs the same warmth, the same envelopment, and the same tenderness as suits his own tenderness, which is to say his fragility and sensitivity. Protection from shocks and collisions? He will need the same protection for a long time, and the protective role of parents is clearly undermined if they themselves are hitting him. A nourishing environment? It is necessary for him to have something to take the place of the umbilical cord: the mother's breast, or failing that, a bottle, along with the assurance that someone will tend to his needs for many years to come. Natural "cleansing" as ensured by the blood's circulation? For some years he will need his parents to keep him clean until he is capable of doing so himself. Relative freedom of movement? He should have all the relative freedom of movement that is commensurate with his ongoing development. Close communication and sympathy ("feeling for") between himself and his mother? Throughout his entire life he will need to have sympathy for others, and he will know how to share in others' feelings if those around him in childhood know how to share in his. Recognition of biological uniqueness? He will seek all his life to be acknowledged and accepted as a unique individual. Such are the elements of the "second-egg phase" which Marie Thirion discusses in her book Les Compétences du nouveau-né [The skills of a newborn] and are absolutely vital for a baby during its first years. To the degree that we respond to a child's needs, he will understand that he must also respect his parents' needs. Pierre Lassus says the same thing in different terms when he defines the roles of parents using this mnemonic phrase: Protect, Provide, Permit [in the sense of allowing to thrive]. These are the exact functions which the mother's body carries out during pregnancy. The familial "body" which surrounds the child must carry out the same functions, while also offering models of behavior by word and, most importantly, by example. Doesn't permissiveness have more serious consequences than a loving but strict upbringing accompanied by a few timely whacks? In reality, spanking and permissiveness frequently go hand-in-hand. Quite often one finds that parents lack consistency, smacking the child without really requiring him to comply with the order he is given. On the other hand, the use of violent means to make children obey may get results up to a certain age, but once the child can escape into the street, or even run away from home, or when his size and strength exceeds that of his parents, the parents are left without recourse. The child, for his part, if used to behaving only because of sanctions he received, is left without an internal compass and given to all sorts of influences. So parents are reduced to lax, powerless figures just when teens most need their affection and involvement. The choice, then, is not between spanking and permissiveness. What children need, as described by Steve and Shaaron Biddulph, are the duo of soft love and firm love. Soft love does not mean letting

children do whatever they want. And firm love excludes not only hitting but also verbal violence, judging, and threats. We will see examples of both later on.

Doesn't a child also need limits? The idea that children need limits is frequently argued by certain people, psychoanalysts in particular, as if limits were a good thing in and of themselves. As they see it, if the law did not prohibit things, such rules would practically have to be invented. They think that the child, driven by dangerous impulses, must have strict limits imposed upon him. Undoubtedly, children should be informed of prohibitions that exist in the society in which they live. They must know the dangers of infringing upon them. Which is not to say that parents should always justify them. Some parents who live in a society overrun with multiple taboos should make their child aware of them, but should not necessarily oblige him to respect those norms, and it is even desirable, if they are absurd, to point out the absurdity to him. Aside from that, the only prohibitions that are desirable to inculcate in a child are those having to do with respect for others, especially towards those who are weaker. But these are taught mainly by the very manner in which the child is treated. It is rare for a child who is loved and who has never borne the brunt even of gestures suggestive of hitting will hit other children, and he does not need to be told not to. Or if he sometimes does it in imitation of others, an explanation generally suffices for him to stop hitting. As for the rule against incest between brothers and sisters, which does call for due vigilance, transgressions seem most prone to occur in families where there is not much talking, or where parents themselves create a sexually charged atmosphere because they do not recognize the boundaries between the kind of tenderness and verbal expressions that is proper to erotic love and that which is proper to simple affection, or perhaps when one child has himself suffered sexual abuse of maltreatment which impels him to establish a relationship of power over his siblings. But in a family where lines are clearly drawn between conjugal eroticism and parental affection, immediate and straightforward answers to the questions children ask combined with the simple fact of having been raised together, which, as with apes, inhibits the sexual instinct vis-à-vis brothers and sisters, are enough to prevent the risk of incest.

By not hitting children, don't we risk turning them into "little emperors/empresses"? It is wrong to think that hitting a child will keep him from becoming spoiled or even tyrannical toward others. A lot of children react to blows with defiance and arrogance and become veritable tyrants, not with their parents, but with their brothers and sisters and those around them. The hickory-stick approach, moreover, is often accompanied by inconsistency and slackness. What allows children to become respectful young adults, then, is having lived with adults who respected them as well as each other. In

this way, the child acquires, without having to be punished or constantly lectured, the capacity to feel equal with others, neither superior nor inferior.

Doesn't hitting a child prepare him for the harshness of life? What prepares a child to face the harshness of life are good foundations, whose establishment is made possible by respecting him throughout his childhood and by responding to his need for affection. These are what give him the solid bases, emotional balance, clear intelligence, and fertile imagination that will enable him to overcome difficulties, whatever they may be. Being hit can only lead to he himself becoming an element of "life's harshness"

What is it that makes someone prone to hit? Later we shall see the difficulties which have to do with the child's behavior itself and how they can be addressed. But we should first be aware that it is extremely rare that someone is prepared for the role of father or mother. More often than not, we have only the experience of our own upbringing. Which means that we are more or less inclined to raise a child by hitting, depending on the harshness of blows we received. Each person has this habit written into their body and mind. So raising their child or children without hitting will not be automatic. It will be easier for those who were not hit themselves. But even then, the example set by other parents hitting their children, society's general acceptance of slapping and spankings, or particular trials with one's children can lead some parents who were not themselves hit (or who do not remember being hit--though their neurons certainly do!) to go along with custom.

Why is it necessary to ban hitting? The role of parents is a role attended by risks. One has in their hands enormous power over the child, and where there is power there is also the risk of abuse of power. When you drive a car, you are seated in a heavy, swift, and powerful projectile, which can do fatal harm if it is not driven carefully and if the rules of the road are not heeded. When you are a parent, you are a heavy, swift, and powerful being who can cause, physically and morally, fatal harm to a child. It is therefore necessary to set rules of the parenting road, since society has not done so, that will make it possible to live with children without crushing or colliding with them. This does not come naturally, if you yourself were crushed and collided with.

Isn't the best method of raising a child to "go by feel"? We would certainly like to think so. Unfortunately, the way we were raised seldom allows us to be completely ourselves. We are not always the true authors of our spontaneous reactions, especially when it comes to raising children. When we hit a child, is it really us who are hitting? Or is it our mother or father hitting through us?

Doesn't a ban on hitting take away from having a spontaneous and natural rapport with the child? On the contrary, by accepting corporal punishment, accepting that a child can be beaten or hit, even lightly, we are actually renouncing ourselves. We are approving the blows which we received as children, for reasons we cannot even discern and which, as good as our parents may have been, were certainly wrong. It is a literal forsaking of our inner child. It is to turn away from his or her suffering, which could never be taken seriously. It is to make light of our suffering, of our child's tears. It is to look down on those tears with an air of adult superiority in the belief that we have every right to hit a child. It is to amputate completely a part of ourselves, of what is most precious: our earliest emotions. So, when we decide not to hit, it is a ban we impose not on ourselves, but rather on the conditioned reflex we acquired from the first slaps we received. To not punish, to not hit, is to get back in touch with our true selves. As children, we did not like being hit and punished. By deciding to break with this practice, we become ourselves once again, we rediscover our deep need to have with others, and especially with our child, a relationship of complete trust, sympathy, affection, the same kind we appreciate having with those whom we love the most, and which we would lose if they were to start beating us.

Doesn't raising a child consist of instilling rules in him, one way or another? In fact, for a long period, the child does not need any upbringing. He only requires that adults tend to his needs, protect him, and allow him to develop. "Respecting children," writes Marie Thirion, "starts first and foremost with respect for their natural rhythms and for the unique beings they are. A child's awakening and education will come from within, from what he wonders, because a happy, free, and peaceful child always wishes to learn and evolve" (Les Compétences du nouveau-né ["Skills of the newborn"], p.219). This idea is key upon reading Chantal de Truchis's book, L'Eveil de votre enfant ["Your child's awakening"] and Christiane Bopp-Limoge's, L'Eveil à l'enfant, Enfants/Adulte, which is based on the experience of the nursery of Dr. Emmi Pikler in Budapest. The double benefit of this method of awakening is that it never sets up the child to fail and that the child is allowed to deploy his abilities and discover for himself what his own possibilities are. What's more, it prevents the child from skipping stages of development, such as crawling on all fours, which are evidently important for certain

learning tasks. In fact, as Norm Lee writes, "Children are born with the drive to acquire discipline in their own way" as needed to live, provided that he has good models. He should also be granted maximum freedom within safety limits. If the child, before he begins to walk, which is to say when we are obliged to place limits on him, has had his needs respected, it will be easier to raise him without even punishing him when constraints become necessary.

What behaviors by parents risk creating conflicts? Any misplacement of the child with respect to oneself is conflict-generating. The right placement of the parents is surely beside the child, neither above nor below, and neither too close nor too far. Putting yourself above the child, establishes a relationship of power over him. Examples: making yourself out to be infallible; judging the child; humiliating him; insulting him; giving him orders rather than inviting him to do things with the same respect you expect from him; not letting the child have any freedom or peace and quiet; nagging him; mocking him; teasing him; demanding his respect without respecting him yourself; claiming to "know" the child, which risks pigeon-holing him into a sense of self that comes from without. Putting yourself below the child is to assume a permanent state of powerlessness. Pleading with the child to do what he should; whining if he doesn't do it; giving him orders without making sure he complies; not taking your own needs into account. Putting yourself too close to the child is to not give him space; requiring constant shows of affections from him; not giving him free time; seeking to have an exclusive relationship with him that interferes with his other relationships; getting "on his nerves". Putting yourself too far, is neglecting him, not spending time with him; not cuddling him; not playing with him; not talking enough to him; not looking at him; being cold towards him. An inconsistent attitude, sometimes authoritarian, sometimes permissive, is not recommended either. Not doing what you say you'll do; acting contrary to what you say ("No, no! We don't ever say no!", or "There, take that! That'll teach you not to hit someone smaller than you!"); to blow hot and cold.

What behaviors by children frequently cause parents exasperation, and how should they respond? Crying, and particularly the nighttime crying of an infant. Possible responses: find out the reason for the crying and remedy it; comforting and speaking softly; rocking and repositioning; taking turns being with the child; telling yourself (though the sleepless nights are long!) that it's a temporary phase that won't last for a long time. Some parents decide on "co-sleeping" (having the infant sleep with the parents, either on a mattress beside their bed or in the very same bed with them) and find it to be calm and pleasant. Humankind has spent nights this way for millennia. So the howls of protest that sometimes greet this idea are unwarranted. It can be tried, if it is tolerable. When the child is older and can be reasoned with: asking him why he's crying; solving the problem if possible; not telling him to stop crying, since he may need to; avoid telling him, "It's no big deal," since he is obviously pained. If the child cries continually, or "throws a fit", and if you've really done all you can and your nerves are

frayed/frazzled, one possibility is to install a "cry room", which is any room in the house (not a dark closet, of course!) where the child is entitled to go and cry and where it is understood that he will stay until he has calmed down; the door is shut but definitely not locked, the room is lighted, and he exits of his own volition once he has calmed down. Do not send him there in a spirit of punishment, but very lovingly tell him the truth: the noise of his crying is making you a little tired, and if he needs to cry, he can go cry for as long as he wants in the "cry room." There is no reason why you cannot use the cry room yourself for the same purpose so that he will see it is not a punishment place. Using the cry room is different than the use of "time out," recommended in America, as an alternative to corporal punishment, and which consists of enclosing the child for a set time according to his age (one minute per year old). But here you start getting into punishment, which is best to avoid completely if possible. This suggestion of the "cry room," which I made in the first edition of this book, is nonetheless only a makeshift solution, and it has been pointed out to me that it risks giving the child the impression that we are not attentive to their suffering. What Steve and Shaaron Biddulph propose, a "stand and think," strikes me as more positive in that it requires the child only to stay in a corner of the room he happens to be in and to think about ways to solve his problem. It should not be framed as a punishment but as a moment for reflection, while really engaging his imagination. And it should be followed by a discussion with him. Violent or aggressive gestures sometimes are due to simple exuberance. Maybe the young child hits his parents with his hands or feet, pinches, bites, twists their noses or ears, pokes their eyes, etc. Possible responses: initially, the child has no idea he is doing anything wrong; to him it is just another game and at times a sign of affection. Christiane Bopp-Limoge writes that "the act of biting is a sign of love . . . he bites that which he loves just as he has suckled at the breast of the one he loves . . . the biting child who is scolded can experience great distress." (L'Eveil à l'enfant, p. 37). So it is necessary to teach him that he should not bite while recognizing the non-aggressive nature of his impulse. One should avoid laughing at his behavior, lest he make a game out of it. Talking to him, even if he is only an infant who seems unable to understand. Not telling him, "Stop, you're being bad!" but rather: "You're hurting me," or better yet: "I hurt when you do that." (The use of "I" to express sensation and emotion is better understood than the accusatory "you're") and, if he starts doing it again, placing him on the floor and walking away after telling him why. If these small aggressions are repeated, trying to figure out the cause (jealousy, or some other kind of interpersonal problem?). If necessary, talking about it with a doctor or psychologist. If the child attacks, pinches, bites, or pulls the hair of his brother or sister or other children, you can try to make him appreciate the fact that such behavior brings rejection by others. To that end, you might put on a slightly overdramatic skit, performed when the child seems to be in the mood to understand, and in which he is not the aggressor but the victim, the part of the aggressor being played by one of the parents or by an older brother or sister. A parent then steps in and takes the aggressor aside to a designated room to spend some time away, obliged to stay there until he or she promises not to attack the repeat-

aggressor-turned-victim anymore. In this way, he will comprehend that the steps taken to protect those whom he attacks would also be done for him if he were attacked. And then, if he starts up again, go through the procedure of taking him aside, without getting angry, not as a punishment but as a consequence of his behavior, which has forced us to protect those he is attacking by moving him away. A child's reckless and impulsive behavior often scares parents and consequently will often provoke spankings. The most commonly cited example is the child who runs out into the road without looking and whom the mother or father, venting their fear, spanks. If the child is inclined toward impulsive reactions, shaking him is not the way to get him to be more thoughtful. At the most, he will stop himself out of fear when his parents are present. But, when he no longer has to fear getting spanked, he will no longer control himself. Possible responses: explain to him that you were afraid for him; explain to him what the danger is; hold his hand while on the street as long as he is not capable of self-control; teach him how to use the crosswalk by making a game where the red-green buddy tells us when we can cross. If the child has gone over to the neighbors without telling his mother and she got distressed not knowing where he was, explain to him that she was scared because she loves him, and he must always announce his ventures outside. If necessary, placing by the door some kind of sound signal (like a bell or whistle) for the sole purpose of letting his parents know he is going out. Damage caused willfully or accidentally by the child is another source of parental anger. The child writes with a marker on the wallpaper of the floor, tears the wallpaper, knocks over your great uncle's Ming vase, etc . . . Generally the child means no harm. He is exploring his world, experiencing things. Peeling away wallpaper is a wondrous and fascinating experiment in which all of us have indulged. Solution: the first principle is obviously to arrange the child's living space so that all fragile valuables are out of the child's reach, along with anything else that he should not touch, and to lock up cupboards where such items are kept and putting away the key for safe keeping. As a trade-off, you can grant him permission to take out things which are set aside for him in plastic bins and let him play with the empty bins. This does not make working in and moving about the kitchen easier, but it is worth the peace of mind. As for his adventures in drawing and painting, provide some sheets of paper taped to the walls. It may be necessary and wise to demonstrate for toddlers how not go outside the edges of the paper. Noise. Silence is definitely not children's strong suit. Even the most serene children are capable of yelling in such a way that puts adult eardrums to the test. To alleviate this stressor, you can adapt your living space and muffle the shouts as much as possible by putting carpets on the floors and walls. You can accustom the child to shouting as little as possible by trying to avoid shouting yourself, whether in talking to the child or to your spouse (the best way to restore calm in a classroom that's a little stirred up is to lower your own voice). It's OK to grant the child opportunities to let off steam; in return he is expected to express himself without shouting the rest of the time. One can, if it is feasible (though to have it sometimes you have to really want it) have a soundproof room to retreat into from time to time while your spouse takes over the supervision. It may be necessary, if you've reached your personal threshold of tolerance, to move into a larger apartment or a villa. The author of this book and his

wife always preferred to sacrifice a sizable portion of their meager single-income (beginning teacher's salary) in order to be able to rent a villa, which saved them a lot of annoyance with their five children. It can ultimately be said that the racket-filled times are not very long, that those years of noisy childhood will quickly pass. Tantrums. In Isabelle Filliozat's book Au cœur des émotions de l'enfant ["At the heart of the child's emotions"] which I can't recommend highly enough to every parent, she explains that tantrums, as trying as they can be for parents, is a normal way for children to affirm their needs and wants. It is a normal stage of what is known as the "grieving process" that follows the inevitable frustrations in the life of a child. It is also a way for the child to express his feelings, which means that it is, despite appearances, a bond the child establishes with his family circle. "Maintain the bond," she writes, "while remaining present, attentive and respectful."). And she calls for us to make a distinction between tantrums and violence. No easy task, given that in many cases, our own tantrums having been disregarded when we were children, we are afraid of that which still seethes within us and which we recognize in our child. A tantrum should therefore be heeded because it signals a need. But if the child's tantrum rises to the level of violence, particularly against his sibling, it is also up to the parents to contain the violence and to prevent him from doing harm. "Fits" at the supermarket. Everything in a supermarket is practically tailor-made to kindle children's desires. When parents refuse to satisfy these desires, it often brings on loud and tearful protests, which attract attention from all the customers and put parents to a hard test. Prevention lies in setting out clear rules about what is acceptable behavior. The majority of children readily accept these rules. But it is often when a child gets angry that parents, under the pressure of looks from the crowd or because it is their usual manner of treating their child, resort to hitting. How to act without resorting to such measures? It all depends on your personal ability to withstand disapproving looks from other customers. If it is strong enough that you do not leave the store without completing the purchase of everything on your shopping list, you can tell your child that although you're really sorry that you couldn't buy everything he wanted, it was truly not possible. But, you can still imagine together what it would be like if he (or she) had that coveted racecar (or doll). How he will play with it if by chance he asks for it for Christmas or his birthday. The simple act of daydreaming about those toys can momentarily suffice. And if he continues to cry, you can do as Edwige Antier recommends and explain to the customers that he is tired. The constant "No!" This is a phase that nearly all children go through at some point, saying "No!" to all our commands. Paradoxically, it is a matter of asserting himself in the negative. It is also his way of echoing our own "No!"'s, which have maybe been too frequent. One step to prevent the constant "No!" might be, as seen earlier, to arrange the child's play space so as to not have to say "No!" too often. That said, this time of particular trial cannot be avoided altogether, and you have to feel sorry for those parents--especially when everyone must be dressed in the morning before school. When the child has

entered this period, one possible tactic is simply to look for him to say "No!" to some command which his own needs will pretty much require him to accept. For example, when he is told to come to the table: -- "No!" -- "No? All right, then!" and you remove, without anger or apparent satisfaction, his place setting as if it were completely natural. And you stick to it, depending on his age, whether it be until everyone has begun eating and the child has had time to start worrying he won't get to eat at all or, if he is a bit older, until the next meal. In other instances, you can bypass the "No!" by proposing an alternative to which the child can neither answer yes or no. For example: "Would you rather take your bath before of after supper?" Or: "Do you want me to undress you, or would you rather get undressed yourself?" This trick, like any other, does not always work, but it can be useful for a time, as long as it is not repeated too often. But the "No!" phase itself lasts only for a time . . . Arguing. What I have said concerning noise also applies in part to arguments between children, which are even more trying because parents feel like their vision of domestic harmony and family unity is under attack. It is therefore quite tempting to settle conflicts by treating the warring parties to a double spanking. Possible responses: Try not to suppress the fits and minor scuffles which often are games and relationship skill-builders in which they can learn to show restraint; accept some brawling up to a certain point, while telling the children they must not be dangerous toward each other (I can still hear my father saying, "Go ahead and fight, just don't hurt each other!"); set up a "ruckus corner" out of rugs and cushions. Do not take sides. Invite the possibly injured party to try to work things out with his brother, sister, or playmate. Remind the children that you do not hit them (if true!), so they shouldn't hit each other either, except playfully without trying to hurt. Intervene if you see things are getting out of hand, saying, for example: "That's it now, you've beaten up each other enough" and/or by diverting them toward another activity that you can get going with them. Disobedience. Disobedience is normal. Nobody likes having to take orders. And if the parenting role sometimes calls for making children do things they don't feel like doing, they shouldn't be taught to obey in the sense of doing things with neither approval nor understanding. It is one thing to get a child to do what he is told but another thing to teach him to obey orders he receives whether he understands and approves of them or not. It is important, from a very early age, to explain to him why one does this or that thing at this or that moment. You should keep to a minimum the disagreeable things that you must impose on him. There is no point in creating more opportunities for conflict. We can make the clock an ally as early as possible: "As soon as the big hand is at the top/bottom, it will be time to take a bath." For certain tasks, such as putting away toys, it is necessary to undertake them with the child, while trying to make a game out of the procedure: "We're going to put all the toys beddie-bye, then into their home inside the cupboard-house." In some instances, when the child is vacillating, you must explain to him that time is short and take him by the hand or arm, not violently, but firmly and with a resolute tone of voice, as children are very good at sensing hesitation in a parent's voice. That being said, there's no

reason exceptions can't be made from time to time, but it must be made clear that they are exceptions due to having a little extra time. The key is always to respect the child's needs, all the while being true to yourself and respecting your own needs.

Is it difficult not to hit? The author of this book and his spouse, who, following the advice of Dr. Spock, avoided striking their children, in fact did not strike them for as long as they had only two, both of them girls. Things changed with the birth of the following two, both of them boys. This number made for a more difficult situation, and as Spock used to say, "a spanking can clear the air," so there were some punishments, and some slapping. With the raising of the fifth child, however, born seven years after the previous one, things went back to being quite easy, and he never received the slightest smack or punishment. Thing would have undoubtedly gone better had we applied the method prescribed by Norm Lee, who explains how every weekend he conducted "general assemblies" with his two children as soon as they were able to take part, chaired by each member of the family in turn, during which the family would make a weekly report and where everyone, children and parents alike, had the right to express their criticisms and their demands as well as their causes for satisfaction. And the whole family worked together to solve problems. This method enabled Norm Lee to never scold nor punish his two sons, much less hit them.

How do you move beyond reflex to reflection? First, you have to make the decision to do so. This can be personal and unspoken. But it might do well to be public and a bit formal. A reader of Spanking told me of convening his children after reading the book, and telling them, "Well, this book convinced me that spanking is wrong. So I've decided I won't be hitting you anymore." "And it worked," he told me. A year later, I followed up: "So, it's still working?" - "Yep, still working!" Another account on the discussion group Parents_conscients: "The day the family made a rule against assaulting one another in any way (smacks, slapping, spanking, etc.), Elfie announced, 'OK, I won't hit my little brother ever again,' and her behavior changed radically. They have taken to roughhousing for fun. At times it goes overboard, but that's a different story . . ." Once the decision has been made not to hit, and if possible, not to punish, the hard part is to decondition oneself from the acquired reflex, which is not really natural for us, and to retrace its path internally like returning to a fork in the road where we got off course and set out again in the right direction. One must learn to take the pause needed to counter reflex with reflection, placing individual thought against the frequent radio-controlled reaction that originates from the first blows we received as children. Keeping in mind that, like all parents, we generally wish for our children to learn to control themselves and not hit their little brother or sister can help us to stay in control of ourselves.

A few deep breaths "from the stomach", which causes the diaphragm to lower and relax, can help us find our center and step back a little from the situation, when we are at risk of getting "beside ourselves." Practicing yoga or other relaxation techniques can also help. To achieve this internal distance from the situation, you might also quite simply place some external distance between yourself and the child, for example leaving the room. Canadian psychologist Daniel Lambert, for one, suggests adopting a signal whose meaning children will have explained to them (for example, an open hand as if to say "Stop!") that expresses one's risk of no longer being able to control oneself and that a break is needed so as not to end up hitting. Another purpose of the signal is to avoid using words that in moments of stress could be hurtful and accusatory. The aim is to find a way to behave that will dismantle within the child the reflex which he has begun to pick up in response to our attitude. Acting indifferent to certain behaviors that are exasperating but not really serious, yelling for example, can also be a way of dismantling this kind of reflex. The child who, having grown accustomed to seeing his parents react at the drop of a hat, can't resist provoking this reaction, and often gives it up when he sees his attitude is no longer having the same effect. This takes a bit of time and effort at the beginning, especially if there is a longstanding habit of hitting, but then, as the reflexes start to fade away, solutions come more easily. For example: "Matthew doesn’t want to eat, he just won't eat!" Conditioned reflex: I scold him, I yell, and I give him a smack. Reflection: "Is it really that he doesn't eat? In fact, he's in good health, he is full of energy, so he must be eating. Is he really slow to eat? Yes, he dawdles. What can be done to prevent this? Maybe serve food to myself but not to him. Not to punish him, but because after all he is not obliged to be hungry at the same time I am. Wait for him to ask for food. At most, if he doesn't ask, let him skip a meal. If he does ask, give him just a small portion, two or three mouthfuls. Wait for him to ask for seconds and give him less than I think he's going to eat. In other words, take apart the conditioned reflex of command-disobedience-punishment and start over on the twin bases of the child's feeling of hunger and the mother or father's need to see the child eat without it being a big production. "When Trevor eats with his sister, he insists on making obnoxious noises and yelling, which drives me crazy, especially when we're visiting friends or our parents!" Conditioned reflex: I give him a smack and send him to his room. Reflection: What personal need of mine makes me unable to put up with this behavior? The need to eat in peace, free from racket; to have my children not disturb the people whose home I happen to be in? For his part, what need drives Trevor to behave this way? On the one hand, there is his normal and natural exuberance; on the other hand, no doubt, my reactions which have set off in him a conditioned reflex of provocation. There are apt to be several solutions. In this case, having the children eat before the adults. Make the meal a time for telling Trevor a story. Giving permission for a bit of a ruckus before the meal, but asking the children to speak calmly at mealtime. Asking my partner, if he or she is less "on edge," to take charge of mealtime for a while in exchange for another task to make up for the time spent disarming the reflex.

Another example: "Billy doesn't listen. I always have to repeat everything!" Conditioned reflex: When I've asked him three times to put on his slippers and he hasn't done it, I storm into his room, and he gets a spanking. Self-reflection and reflection on the situation: "Is it really that he doesn't listen? There are things he hears loud and clear and does right away. What does he not listen to? Orders that annoy him, that interfere with his playing. I don't like it either when I'm given tedious orders and interrupted in the middle of doing something I enjoy. Is it really necessary for him to wear his slippers? If it's summertime, there's no harm if he goes barefoot. If it's cold, if he is prone to catch cold, he really must put them on." The problem is better defined. It's no longer about laying judgment on Billy. It's about figuring out how to get him in the habit of wearing his slippers. It's up to me to use some imagination and find a trick: some funny slippers that look like mice, or telling him a story about how his feet are bunny rabbits that like to keep warm in their holes, etc. Another example: "Laura is a crybaby, she whines and cries over nothing." Conditioned reflex: When Laura starts crying, I lose it and give her a smack. Reflection on my goals, on myself, and on Laura: "Is Laura really a crybaby? I can't say whether it is her nature; maybe it's a passing thing. Does she cry over nothing? It's true that she's crying a lot right now. On account of what exactly? She might be having some sort of problem. But what? I'll try to talk to her about it when she's not so upset. Could she be jealous of her little brother . . . ? At the same time, why does her crying irritate me so much? Isn't it true there are things irritating me which have nothing to do with Laura?" The spouse of this book's author has used, when facing this type of difficulty with one of her children, a process of visualization and positive reprogramming. It involved focusing her mind on how the child was at other times: cheerful, lighthearted, and full of laughter, and putting herself, even as the child was being sullen, in the frame of mind she had at that earlier time. It did not take long to yield positive results.

And if you're pressed for time? Time shortages definitely do not make it easier to adopt nonviolent disciplinary methods. What to do, for instance, when you have to get big sister to school by eight-thirty and little brother refuses to let himself be dressed? Solutions will tend to focus on prevention, as in an earlier wake-up call, or being dressed as a requirement for breakfast. Or even doing away with certain demands: having little brother sleep in outer clothes so as not to have to change, for example. It is clear, however, that mothers who find themselves alone with several children and who have to run around constantly just to get the most essential things done--and then some--need extra patience and determination not to give in to those moments when it would be very easy to slap or to spank.

And when you are close to snapping and saying or doing something unpleasant? Here's a suggestion from Blandine, a poster on the Parents conscients discussion group: "When I have a certain degree of detachment, I'll use Captain Haddock insults . . . that's enough that we all end up laughing. . . mind you, though, I can't be too worked up, and I have be able to step back from it all to just the right degree . . ." Suggestion from Fabienne, in the same group: "When I feel like my anger's rising, I growl. A kind of growl that I've developed, very low that comes from the belly (and gives a nice massage to the diaphragm and sternum). The result is rather comical. To "see myself" growling like that, it just makes me want to laugh. My daughter doesn't like it too much, of course. She says, "Mommy, stop doing that," to which I answer, "I'm growling because I've had enough of such and such." That usually works to defuse the situation. Another "method," in "cooperation," with my little girl: when sparks are flying between us, we start barking, even doing like wolves. Aurrooo! Au! Au! Aurrooo! This makes us stop and break out laughing. Another way to say "Don't be such a pain" while at the same time defusing the situation. Along the same lines, if a situation is on the verge of degenerating, I put it into song, loudly if I can, and if possible in a comical manner. Example: "We got those girls-stuck-here-in-the-car blu-u-u-ues again! What's taking Dad so lo-ong at the darn ATM?! Oh, where could he beeeeeeee? We are so hungryyyyyyy. We want to go home, you seeeeeeee." They are only clever gimmicks, but, as Fabienne goes on to write: "I like the idea of having a wide variety of 'tricks' at my disposal, that way I can run through them by turns. Sometimes, relaxation is most helpful, other times it's singing, sometimes it's going for silly laughs, like pretending to be a dog, you know, nothing works all the time, but I have some aces up my sleeve for when I'm . . . just about to fold. The hardest part is remembering that you have all those aces. In the midst of a tantrum being thrown, you forget everything. It really takes discipline to remember that there's a way out. It takes a while to get the knack . . . you've got your work cut out for you ;-)".

Should parents express their own feelings and needs? Just as parents must be attentive to the needs of their children, they must be attentive to their own needs, expressing them along with the feelings that they give rise to. This point cannot be elaborated here, but it is a very important point. For readers who wish to consider it more in depth, there are two books they will want to check out: Isabelle Filliozat's Au cœur des émotions de l'enfant ["At the heart of the child's emotions"], mentioned above, and Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life. The first is more geared toward raising children. The second is a general method of nonviolent communication of which many elements can be very useful in parent-child relationships.

What to do with a particularly violent child? Account of an adoptive father: "I have a little boy who's four years old. He has quite a remarkable talent for provoking and being confrontational. This child has lived through intense physical abuse . . . (...) He was entrusted to me with some apologies for his being 'difficult,' and people are always telling me 'good luck' with an air of resignation. I have found him to be an extremely easy child, but at the slightest annoyance (or for no apparent reason) he is capable of hitting me, biting me, insulting me or breaking everything around him. I've had to set firm limits (it's not that I'm letting him do these thing!), but the easy thing for me would have been to say, 'You're not being nice to me, so I'll give you a spanking, and when you've come to your senses we can get along like before.' No doubt that would have worked, but I think we would still be the same boat today. Since I've never responded violently to his own violence, I think that allowed him over time to ponder the correct way to express his expectations, his frustrations, his fears. He is a child given to verbalizing. I remember one day when while having a tantrum he said, 'But Daddy, I want you to hit me!' I held him tightly in my arms, and he had a good long cry. Since that day, his physical attacks have come to be more symbolic (along the lines of: 'In that case, I'll give you a good kick,' but without doing it...). It seems to me that not getting physical in response to his violence allowed him to gain awareness of the nature of the forces at play and then to get past it." (Forum Droits de l'enfant (Children's Rights Forum), posted by Philippe, October 13, 1999). Online testimonial (January 30, 2002) from a Quebec educator, Stéphane Vincelette, who has had to deal with some particularly violent children: "What is the proper reaction when a young child throws a 'royal fit,' lashing out and screaming at the top of his lungs? It could be to go about your business and tell him that you'll be willing to listen to him just as soon as he is ready to talk. Naturally, the tantrum may last for several minutes and will certainly be nerve-wracking. Then again, if the child is putting himself or anyone else in danger, including yourself, physically putting a stop to things is called for. With a physical intervention, the idea is to contain the child and not to hurt him. Getting behind the child and holding his arms will usually be enough to get him to calm down after a few minutes. The interpersonal aspect always being crucial, always speak calmly to him, telling him that you are there with him. Tell him that you'll let go of him once he calms downs, but not before he has calmed down. If he calms down, let go of him. If he starts right up again, repeat the process as many times as needed. Only then will he understand that the rule is hard and fast. "I myself endured the tirade of a ten-year-old which lasted for more than three hours (five hours if you count the build-up) and went through all the stages: violence, blackmail, intimidation, appeals to pity, sulking… Most likely this was effective in his usual environment and he couldn't imagine anyone being able to withstand his "war arsenal" for such a long period. He began to realize that my "barricade" was maybe more solid than his "cannonballs," made from the same stuff as the house of the third little pig, of bricks and mortar. It was then that he shyly held out an "olive branch" which I used with some humor in order to let the air out of the situation. That was likewise the chance to show that I could still laugh with

him spite of this meltdown he'd just had, and most of all accept him in spite of it. One part of the story I haven't told you up 'til now is that I had his teeth marks engraved on my arm for weeks afterwards . . . The point is really that what determines the medium- and long-term 'winners' with a tantrum situation, a mini-tantrum, or simply the breaking of a rule, is your patience and ability to intervene rather than react to the behavior. If you react, you're bound to end up with two losers--you and your child--with no winner. On the other hand, if you intervene appropriately, there will be two winners: you and, just as surely and equally so, your child." With older children and teenagers, bad habits are often already established: They have integrated the mechanisms of violence which they have endured and recreate them more or less on a daily basis. How should someone react to their violent reactions? When a fabric is folded, the crease is difficult to erase. But a teen or a still-young adult has within him human capabilities which, despite being misdirected and atrophied by violence suffered in childhood, can be reactivated. The best policy is always genuine respect for the child or young adult, along with self-respect, expressing and listening to emotions: telling the child how you feel while tuning in to what he feels. The nonviolent communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg, based on the expression and listening to feelings and needs, something which most of us were not used to in our own childhood, can be a useful tool in helping teens accustomed to the language of hitting and violence to enter into verbal dialogue. The November 15, 2001 edition of Envoyé spécial [newscast of TV channel France 2] showed the extraordinary work realized by a psychologist in a South African prison with gang leaders. At the end of some mutual expression and listening sessions, these rapists and ruthless killers, who at the beginning of the experiment just wanted to kill the psychologist out of fear that he would weaken their stature within the prison, were starting to express themselves in deeply moving ways. Although they were not cured, they clearly had taken a step in that direction. If it can work with hardened killers, it should be all the more possible with petty thieves or children with violent tendencies. Recap: 12 useful principles to avoid disciplinary violence • Make the decision not to hit. • Know what effects corporal punishment has on children. • Arrange the child's living space so that you're not constantly having to deny him things. • Practice the golden rule: treat the child as you would want to be treated under the same circumstances. • Be receptive to all of the child's feelings, even if they come across as negative (jealousy, for example). While he is not entitled to hit his little brother, his feelings are his own, and he is entitled not to love him.

• • • •

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In situations of conflict, seek "win-win" solutions (as opposed to "win-lose") that satisfy the needs (not necessarily the wants!) of each person. Make a habit of identifying the reason for conflicts in an effort to prevent them, rather than having to mend them. Offer diversions: drawing, a story, a game in the bathtub, taking a walk to leave situations that have gotten too difficult. Ask yourself, "Is this something I will laugh about later?" If yes, why not go ahead and laugh right away? Humor can transform a lot of stressful situations: "Oh, no! You've colored yourself green just when we're leaving to visit Grandma and Grandpa . . . Hold on, I've got to get my camera!" Know your own limitations and hold firm on matters where they have been reached. Know how to let your partner take over. Ask for help, even if it's just to confide your distress: talking to a friend on the phone, your mother, fellow members of an Internet discussion group, or anywhere you know you can find someone friendly, willing to listen, and possibly able to offer solutions.

5 Why Is It Necessary To Ban Disciplinary Violence?

What can we learn from the experience of countries that have banned it? Twelve countries have banned corporal punishment in the home as well as at school and in the judicial system. None of them are planning to go back to the old ways. In Sweden, the law stipulates that children "are to be treated with respect for their person and individuality and may not be subjected to corporal punishment or any other humiliating treatment." As of June 2000, this has led to only one single court appearance. A brochure entitled "Can you bring up children successfully without smacking and spanking?" was circulated and translated into English, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Greek, and Turkish. According to a survey conducted in 1994-95, 70% of high school juniors and seniors and 56% of adults are against corporal punishment of children in any form. The number of Swedes who consider corporal punishment to be indispensible went from 53% in 1965 to 30% in 1970 to 11% in 1995. In an ever-growing number of residential neighborhoods, meeting places have been created where parents of small children can organize varied activities with the assistance of people trained in child education. The results are compelling: between 1982 and 1995, "obligatory measures" decreased by 46% and "removal to foster care" by 26%. The percentage of youths aged 15 to 17 convicted of theft decreased by 21% between 1975 and 1996. Drug and alcohol consumption and suicides also went down. Finland's ban was passed in 1983: "A child shall be brought up in the spirit of understanding, security and love. He shall not be subdued, corporally punished or otherwise humiliated." Norway's ban was passed in 1987: "The child shall not be exposed to physical violence or to treatment which can threaten his physical or mental health". Austria abolished corporal punishment on July 1, 1989. The law prohibits infliction of physical or mental suffering of any kind on children. Violations of this ban, if not excessive, do not immediately lead to sanctions. In Cyprus, prohibition goes back to 1994. In Denmark, a law passed on June 10, 1997 is drafted as follows: "A child has the right to care and security. He or she shall be treated with respect as an individual and may not be subjected to corporal punishment or other degrading treatment." During the fall and winter of 1998, in the schools and childcare institutions, materials were distributed to parents, and a documentary about spanking was broadcast on national television. The same materials were distributed to parents belonging to ethnic minorities

who spoke English, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Arabic, Urdu, and Somali. Since passage of this law, still recent, a third of Danish parents continue to hit their children, but an evolution is beginning to appear which values attention over discipline and control. In June 2000, not a single court case had arisen from this law. In Latvia, it is the Law on Protection of the Rights of the Child of June 19, 1998, based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that prohibits corporal punishment. Croatia outlawed corporal punishment in 1999. Italy, for its part, does not yet have a law concerning corporal punishment, but the country's Supreme Court decided on May 16, 1996, to prohibit parents from using corporal punishment to raise or correct their children. As the lower courts are reluctant to contradict a Supreme Court decision, this decision is regarded as law throughout Italy. Likewise in Israel, it was the Supreme Court who made the decision in January 2000 following an appeals process. The Knesset ratified this decision on June 13 of the same year. The Supreme Court's reasoning for this decision was as follows: "In the judicial, social and educational circumstances in which we live, we must not make compromises that can endanger the welfare and physical well-being of minors . . . We must also take into account that we are living in a society where violence is spreading like a plague, and permission for light violence could deteriorate into more severe violence. There can be no endangering of the physical and emotional well-being of the child through any kind of physical violence. "The norm has to be clear and unequivocal that physical punishment is not permissible." (Source: The Jerusalem Post). Germany passed its ban on July 10th, 2000, set to take effect January 1st 2001. In addition, children's right to a nonviolent upbringing is written into the Civil Code. No form of aggression and humiliation toward children is considered acceptable. "80% of children and youths, to varying degrees, suffer violence in their upbringing, for instance a slap or a thrashing. Close to 1.3 million children suffer physical abuse. Among this group, 420,000 children suffer frequent abuse, many of them as infants or small children. To this must be added, in comparable proportion, psychological violence in the form of rejection by parents or of neglect." But as the government clarifies, "‘The point is not to criminalize parents, but to change the consciousness of our society in regard to child rearing.’ The hope is to provide for increased help to parents in the form of parental education and increased availability and access to treatment and therapy for parenting problems." Iceland is the most recent country to have passed an anti-spanking law, in 2003. [NOTE: Since this book's writing, the list of nations which have abolished corporal punishment has grown to include

Ukraine (2004), Romania (2004), Hungary (2005), Greece (2006), Netherlands (2007), New Zealand (2007), Portugal (2007), Uruguay (2007), Venezuela (2007), Spain (2007), Costa Rica (2008), and Moldova (2009). Updated information is available at www.endcorporalpunishment.org]

Why can we never defeat child abuse as long as we keep tolerating ordinary disciplinary violence? Lots of people reject abolition. Claire Brisset, Ombudsman for Children [2000-2006], says that France is not yet ready for it. Boris Cyrulnik, despite being a passionate advocate for the cause of children's welfare, declares that a ban would only serve to increase psychological and verbal attacks (he does not say what this statement is based on). Still others feel it would just lay guilt on parents. . . It is clear, however, that abuse cases which involve correcting a child to a degree deemed excessive (neglect and sexual abuse being separate matters, of course) are part of a progression from ordinary disciplinary violence. The emergent part of the iceberg that is condemned will always be in proportion to the underwater part that is tolerated. Most forms of abuse, considered as such, start out as "corrections." Many parents begin with a "swat on the diapers" or "on the hand", then, when that proves to be insufficient, get caught up in an escalation that can go well beyond a smack or a spanking. Daniel Goleman writes that "for murder victims under twelve, says a report, 57 percent of the murderers are their parents or stepparents. In almost half the case, the parents say they were 'merely trying to discipline the child.' The fatal beatings were prompted by 'infractions' such as the child blocking the TV, crying, or soiling diapers." This is all the more so when children, out of bravado, may mock the parents ("Didn't hurt!"). The only way to decrease abuse, therefore, is to consider ordinary disciplinary violence unacceptable, to inform people of its dangers, and to propose other discipline methods. But the "Stockholm syndrome" is a constant drag on the evolution towards a general discarding of disciplinary violence. It has taken about two-and-a-half centuries for the public opinion's threshold of tolerance to lower to the level of smacks and spankings. Will it take another century or two for these to no longer be tolerated when even licensed defenders of children are sometimes the ones who reject the idea of a ban? As Alice Miller writes, "We cannot rid ourselves of an evil without first naming and judging it as an evil.”

Raising children is a private matter, so what business does the state have putting a ban on spanking? Marital relationships are also a private matter, but does anyone find it strange that the law prohibits men from hitting their wives? Aren't those who seek to ban spanking extremists and fundamentalists when it comes to non-violence? Shouldn't they be more moderate and reasonable?

When someone calls for the abolition of corporal punishment, they are often accused of being a Puritan, an ayatollah, an extremist and so forth. Those who defend slapping and spanking present themselves as the moderate and reasonable folks who keep everything in perspective. In the exact same way, on the question of domestic violence against women, people used to say: "Let's not get carried away. A little beating never did a wife any harm!" Seeking the abolition of corporal punishment is merely being realistic. Realistic when it comes to parents who, for the very fact of having been hit as children, are unable on their own to stop hitting or even truly question this behavior, which for them is tied to the image they have of their parents and imitation of which is deeply embedded in their neurons. Only a prohibition declared by an authority higher than that of parents can make parents give up this behavior with their own children. Realistic in terms of children's nature, since none of their innate mechanisms equips them to come out unscathed from the slightest violence on the part of those who form their basis of security and in whom they need to have absolute trust. It is this trust that will be the foundation of their self-confidence and of their capacity for understanding towards others. If this pact of trust is broken, it is also their own trust in themselves which is affected because a child victim of mistreatment will blame himself: "If the person I love so much hits me, I must be bad." To seek a ban on corporal punishment, far from being extremist, is to demand for children the bare minimum of integrity that our most valued animals enjoy and which children also need. Such a ban will also be good for the genuine happiness of parents and children alike. Could parents really be happy if their children were hitting them, even "reasonably" and "in moderation"? Likewise, children who are hit "reasonably" and "in moderation" by their parents may find it hard to be truly happy. And that, in turn, affects the parents' mood. A ban is crucial, moreover, given that the survival of mankind is increasingly going to fall upon humans' responsibility and ability to deploy all our emotional and intellectual resources. We cannot continue to allow children to be subjected to hitting of whatever degree of force right when their brains are organizing, thereby distorting them and compromising the fulfillment of their personalities. Our parents didn't know the effects of the blows they were dealing. We, on the other hand, do not have this innocence. We therefore no longer have any right to hit children.

What would the world be like if we stopped hitting children? It would not be Paradise. Most of the problems facing us today would continue to face us. But they would no longer be stoked by the pressure of violence which the majority of adults today carry around from childhood. Adults would not have learned from a very early age that violence towards weaker beings is a normal means of settling conflicts. Among most men and women, the cognitive brain and the emotional brain would have been able to develop without being disturbed by the impact of hitting and would be more in harmony. There would undoubtedly be less depression, less illness, and fewer accidents. Everyone could be happier for the simple fact of existing, with no need for the happiness substitute of racing to have things, to be powerful, and to put on appearances, which is currently in the process not only of deepening outrageous inequalities among men, but also destroying the planet. Our intelligence, being less disturbed by violent childhood emotions, would allow us greater lucidity in choosing candidates for positions of power and in keeping them in check. The speeches of demagogues would have less of a following. The capacity for empathy and compassion, now more respected, would also make persecutions difficult if not impossible. Without a doubt, men would no longer be battering their partners or their children. And those partners would be less inclined to let it be done to them, not having become accustomed to it from an early age. Drug addiction, alcoholism, and tobacco addiction would diminish because mankind, being more prone to cheerfulness, would have less need for artificial bliss.

6 What to do?

If you are a parent, of course make the decision to never again resort to disciplinary violence. Every parent who breaks away from disciplinary violence produces a ripple of children and grandchildren who will likewise not resort to blows in raising their children.

Educate yourself and others. As we have seen, reduced levels of disciplinary violence in Europe began with the realizations of a couple of free thinkers, Erasmus and Montaigne, who had retained enough sensitivity to see what others could not: the tortures to which children were being subjected. As writers, they were able to reach a fairly wide audience, and a more generalized awakening was underway. What is needed, then, is to extend this information further still, to educate ourselves and to educate those around us so that this new awareness will spread. For in-depth examination of the problem, the best reading comes from Alice Miller, in particular For Your Own Good [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002; full text also available at www.nospank.net/fyog.htm] and Banished Knowledge [New York, Anchor-Press, new edition 1997]. Pierre Lassus' books, L'Enfance sacrifiée (Albin Michel, 1997) and Être parents au risque de l'Evangile (Id., 1999) also have a lot to offer, as well as those by Suzanne Robert Ouvray, Enfant abusé, enfant médusé and Le Drame de l'enfant sans limites (Desclée de Brouwer, 1998 et 2003). On the relationship between corporal punishment and accidents, there is Jacqueline Cornet's Faut-il battre les enfants? (Hommes et perspectives, 1997). For gaining a better understanding of children, Au cœur des émotions de l'enfant, by Isabelle Filliozat, (J. C. Lattès, 1999) is quite valuable and a source of good advice. On respecting the child's autonomy, the books of Chantal de Truchis, L'Eveil de votre enfant (Albin Michel) and Christiane Bopp-Limoge, L'Eveil à l'enfant, Enfants/adultes, grandir ensemble. (Chronique sociale, 2000) are a treasure trove of ideas. The best manuals for raising children without violence that are published in French would appear to be Parent Effectiveness Training, by Thomas Gordon [Three Rivers Press, 2000] and The Complete Secrets of Happy Children, by Steve and Shaaron Biddulph [Harper Collins (Australia), Thorsons (U.K.), 2003] [Separate editions: The Secrets of Happy Children (Marlowe and Company, 2002) and More Secrets of Happy Children (2003)]. The Parent's Handbook, by Don Dinkmeyer et Gary D.McKay (Random House, 1997) likewise presents an interesting and progressive approach. And especially for African readers, an excellent manual has been published in Cameroon by the group EMIDA: Une belle aventure: aimer et élever son enfant. Pour comprendre et vivre une relation parents-enfant heureuse [A

beautiful adventure: to love and raise your child. Understanding and living a happy parent-child relationship] (Available in French to order from: EMIDA BP 14197 / Yaoundé / Cameroun.) And for those considering the challenge of disciplinary nonviolence in the broader framework of childrearing that aims to be as respectful as possible of every aspect of the infant or child's personality , a must-read is the Bible of alternative child-raising: Élever son enfant...autrement [Raising your Child . . . Differently], by Catherine Dumonteil-Kremer, with very active participation by the moms of the Parents_conscients discussion group (La Plage, 2003). Chapter 8 of this book, "Une discipline aimante pour une éducation non-violente," [Loving discipline for a non-violent upbringing], is full of good ideas. On videocassette, L'éducation sans violence a conversation between Suzanne Robert-Ouvray, doctor of clinical psychology and therapist, and myself, is also a useful learning tool (Association Anthea, BP 219 83006 Draguignan Cedex, [email protected], 39€).

Which Internet sites are recommended to visit? • The website of Alice Miller: www.alice-miller.com (English/French/German). • The site of the group Ni claques ni fessées (3 Villa Quincy 92170 Vanves. Tél: 01 46 38 21 22): www.niclaquesnifessees.org • www.nospank.net: Very information-rich website created and maintained by Jordan Riak (a few articles in French). • www.stophitting.com (English)

Which organizations are recommended to contact? In France, Ni claques ni fessées (see address above). There is not any international NGO dedicated specifically to the problem of disciplinary violence. UNICEF deals with it, but only as a small part of its activities. The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the entity of greatest magnitude working in this area. In Cameroon, the group EMIDA has undertaken a quite promising effort that with successful expansion could reach all of Africa. They are in need of assistance (EMIDA BP 14197 Yaoundé - Cameroun). In Togo, the LIDE (Ligue Internationale pour les Droits de l'Enfant [International League for the Rights of the Child], BP:7719 Lomé; E-mail: [email protected], Telephone: 00 228 222 40 54 et Tél / Fax 00 228 221 26 13) in March 2004 launched an information campaign against disciplinary violence.

How can we help children who are being hit? Each one of us may have occasion to fill the role of "compassionate witness" that Alice Miller talks about. This basically means treating all children who come our way as people, with the consideration and respect that every person is due and recognizing them as unique individuals. The simple act of giving a look of esteem can for some be a real salve. One person who had been hit as a child still remembered, years later, the "Oh?" of surprise and disapproval by a lady who lived nearby when he told her that he had been hit. That simple exclamation let the child know that what he suffered was not normal. Sometimes a trigger of this kind is all it takes for the child not to copy what he went through. As for corporal punishments dealt at school, going to have a word with the teacher sometimes is enough to put an end to such treatment, at least for the rest of the year in which the child is in that class. In France, intervention can be backed up with a citation of the law banning this practice: Circulaire [regulatory notice] n° 91-124 of June 6, 1991 (B.O. n° 23 - June 13, 1991) 3.2.1-Pre-school No punishment may be inflicted. However, it shall be possible to isolate a child who is being difficult, for a very short time, as needed to conform his/her behavior to the activities of the group. 3.2.2- Elementary school All corporal punishment is strictly prohibited. If you happen to witness a child being slapped or spanked by their mother or father, on the street or in a store, intervening is a difficult and delicate matter. Catherine Dumonteil-Kremer, author of Élever son enfant...autrement, suggests the following actions: Looking at the parent is sometimes enough for them to stop. Asking the parent, in a way that conveys warmth and empathy, if they need any help. Sometimes, you may settle for asking, "What's going on?" in a sympathetic tone. Otherwise, speak directly to the child. Or at least give him a look of moral support if he's crying because his parent hurt him. If it's an older child, try to explain to them that that it's not right to be hit, but that most likely their mother or father has a hard time finding other solutions because he or she was hit as a child. You might also share: "It was hard for me too when my kids were that age" or "Looks like you've had a rough day". A simple gesture like handing a handkerchief to the crying child can disrupt the parent's anger. If the parent is someone whom you know, you can offer to watch the child for a few minutes to give the parent a chance to calm down.

At the institutional level? Sign the declaration (in the appendix which follows) calling on the Prime Minister to bring a bill specifically banning corporal punishment to a vote. If you belong to a religion, write to those in charge and ask them to make a statement unequivocally opposing disciplinary violence.

7 Question for the Author

What led the author to write this book? A retired teacher of French language and literature, the author is not an expert on early childhood. But, at the age of seven, he had to run beneath American squadrons sent to bomb Toulon, and ever since he has been concerned about violence, its causes and its consequences. After searching for a long time through the writings of numerous authors to learn what could be the origin of man's penchant for killing one another and thus creating so much of our own misfortune, he read For Your Own Good, by Alice Miller. There he encountered the idea, surprising at first, that a large part of human violence, whether by ordinary men or the world's most important, could result from the way we treat children. Other books by the same author as well as by others that he read since that time have managed to convince him. This idea that children cannot help but be marked deeply by the violence practiced upon them by those they most love has fundamentally changed his worldview and persuaded him that, in order to make the world more livable, we must give up this notion that we can use hitting to train children with no adverse consequences. Hence this book.

8 Questions for the Reader

As someone involved in research on corporal punishment, the author will be most grateful to readers willing to send him their answers, albeit anonymously, to any of the following questions that inspire them: • Were you yourself hit? From what age and until what age? By whom? (father, mother, grandparents, brother, uncle, another person in your family or its circle of friends, teacher . . . ). • Had corporal punishment been inflicted on the person who hit you? • Were you living in a society where children are currently hit? • Was this method of making you obey beneficial to you? • Do you feel as if you're still suffering from the effects? • Was this something you went through alone, or did you have somebody's support? • Do you see a connection between how you were raised and your opinion now of corporal punishment? • Do you object to the ideas developed in this book? Which ones? • Has this book changed or reinforced your views regarding corporal punishment? • For those who have traveled abroad, have you been able to observe customary practices of corporal punishment for children? Can you offer some precise description: what did the punishments consist of? Inflicted by whom? Upon whom (in terms of sex, age, relationship)? In what circumstance? For what reasons? In private? In public? • Have you been able to observe a relationship between the use of corporal punishment or the absence of it with local views concerning violence? • If you were never hit, how were you raised? • Were you punished? • In what way? • What do you think about your upbringing? If you choose to respond, please indicate your sex, age, and background. Contact: Olivier Maurel 1013C Chemin de la Cibonne 83220 Le Pradet France [email protected]

PART TWO

World Geography of Disciplinary Violence by Continent and Country

Where can information be found about the status of corporal punishment worldwide? The U.N.'s human rights website is the most comprehensive. Its reports of the meetings of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, along with the Committee’s observations, are a rich source of information. Other sites, indicated in the bibliography, also provide clips of information from the news. [For readers of English, the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children also has an excellent comprehensive site at www.endcorporalpunishment.org.]

What is the "state of the world" in terms of corporal punishment? It is dismaying. On every continent, most often at home as well as in the schools, children are being subjected to a hailstorm of blows or living under threat of such. In most countries, the act of beating a child is allowed, if not recommended or even mandated by parents' religion or customs. Social services generally do not step in, except for (at best) cases where the blows have left clearly visible marks, such as bruises or broken skin, or have killed the child. Taboos with respect to physical punishment, especially when it occurs within the family, are even stricter than those surrounding incest or sexual abuse. Initial reports by nations before the Committee on the Rights of the Child, while they usually discuss incest, often "forget" about corporal punishment.

Europe

Northern Europe The situation in northern Europe is one of sharp contrasts, as this region has seven countries which have banned domestic corporal punishment along with two where, on the contrary, the tradition of corporal punishment is very resistant: Ireland and Great Britain. In Ireland, violence towards children is recognized as a real social problem. 92% of 304 mothers questioned by Irish researchers stated that they had resorted to spanking (2.9% among them doing so often or very often), as well as 87% of the 67 fathers responding (7.5% often or very often). It is among the working class that use of corporal punishment is most frequent. Is it any surprise that terrorism has raged so savagely in Ireland? Here is how Frank McCourt, in Angela's Ashes recalls the schoolmasters who shaped the generation of Catholic and Protestant terrorists: There are seven masters in Leamy's National School and they all have leather straps, canes, blackthorn sticks. They hit you with the sticks on the shoulders, the back, the legs, and, especially, the hands . . . They hit you if you don't know why God made the world, if you don't know the patron saint of Limerick, if you can't recite the Apostle's Creed, if you can't add nineteen to forty-seven . . . In schools and orphanages maintained in Dublin by religious orders, children were beaten with chair rungs and rosaries, or tied up and hung from door frames. The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy (as in pity!), who had committed such violent acts up until the 1960's, publicly asked forgiveness from its victims in May of 2004. Great Britain, for its part, spread the motto "Spare the rod and spoil the child" throughout every nation that fell under its dominion. A law dating back to 1860 officially gives parents authority to use corporal punishment in raising children. And in the schools, the practice was so well applied that a young Winston Churchill's parents took him out of his school on account of the brutal corporal punishment to which he was subjected there. Decades later he would write: "How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years." Things are nonetheless beginning to gradually change: in March 1998 the House of Commons abolished school corporal punishment throughout the United Kingdom by a vote of 211 to 15. Flogging, caning, ear-boxing and other punishments had already been banned in state-run schools since 1986. In 1999 this prohibition was broadened to include private schools. And the idea of banning corporal punishment at home is starting to gain ground. In October 2002 a network of churches for nonviolence, composed of representatives from the Church of England (Anglican) and from Reformed Methodist Churches (Protestant), declared their support for a ban on spanking children. They published a guide promoting positive discipline methods which avoid corporal punishment. A number of children's rights

associations, such as Barnados and Save the Children, are campaigning in Great Britain for a ban on the physical punishment on children. But on July 5, 2004, the House of Lords once again refused, by 226 to 91, to abolish physical punishment outright, leaving parents free to apply "reasonable" corporal punishment that leaves no visible marks on the skin. If the House of Commons and the queen approve this vote in November 2004, English children will continue to be denied the legal protection from assault that all adults enjoy. In Scotland some Christian organizations in February and September of 2002 opposed a ban on the corporal punishment of children. But, for the time being, the government refuses to ban physical chastisements entirely, leaving parents free to apply "reasonable" corporal punishment, so long as it is carried out in a "loving and affectionate" context.

Western Europe Two countries from this region, Austria and Germany, have banned corporal punishment in the home as well as in the schools. The other countries remain noncommittal in their stance. The case of France clearly illustrates the ineffectiveness or, to be more exact, the extremely slow effect of legal bans when they apply only to the schools. As we have seen above, the first attempts to reduce violence at school date back to the 17th century. In the 18th century Rousseau's influence led in the same direction. In 1834 an initial ban seems to have been largely ineffective, judging by the persistent level of violence in the schools of the 19th century. The very strict law of 1887 — "it is absolutely prohibited to inflict any form of corporal punishment" — was probably more effective, but it turned out to be offset by a decision which recognized teachers as having a right of correction [i.e., punishment]. A century later, the courts still recognize this same entitlement. And in 1990, 44% of elementary school teachers admitted to sometimes giving spankings. As for violence within the family, according to the Penal Code (Article 222-13), even hitting without causing injury, and no matter what motive has prompted it, is punishable by fines and prison time, with added severity if the victims are under 15 years and when committed by parents or grandparents. Article 312 of the Penal Code [repealed subsequent to this book's publication – hypernote?] establishes penalties for "Whoseoever shall willfully strike or commit acts of assault against a minor below the age of 15 years," while adding, "with the exception of mild violence," which effectively justifies ordinary disciplinary violence. Moreover, the penalties indicated by the Code are so heavy that of course no one wants to see them imposed on parents who engage in spanking or face-slapping. But the result of having no specific laws that address spanking is that, based on a survey conducted by SOFRES for the group Éduquer sans frapper [later to become Ni claques ni fessées], only 16% of parents do not hit their children, which means at least 84% are hitting theirs (even though 45% of those surveyed think that physical punishment has negative consequences).

All the same, we might reflect on how it came to be that anything harsher than a slap in the face or a spanking marks the point at which people see punishment as having crossed over into abuse, which is not to say that such harsh punishments do not occur. This evolution, which was very slow, as we have seen, probably owes much to the influence of child-rearing guides, like those by Benjamin Spock or Françoise Dolto, that either radically condemned spanking, as with Dolto, or did not abide any physical punishment that went beyond a few open-handed swats on the buttocks. It would be interesting to know, for instance, what was the last child-rearing guide to advocate the use of a whip or ruler. Paradoxically, France's Ombudsman for Children [2000-2006], Claire Brisset, feels that it would be premature to seek a ban on disciplinary violence. Boris Cyrulnik, who is very influential in the world of child-care professionals, is on record as an opponent of legal abolition, which according to him would cause verbal abuse to worsen. And when he and Claire Brisset organized a symposium under the title "Chronicle of Hidden Violence" on October 13, 2003, a symposium that supposedly would denounce everyday violence, not a single member of the group Ni claques ni fessées ["Without slaps or spankings"], the only one pressing for this violence to be banned, was invited to take part. Up until now, one lone member of Parliament, André Santini, has indicated support for outlawing all forms of disciplinary violence. On May 22, 2000, he put a question to the Minister for Children and Families by way of signaling to her that a shift in public opinion was at hand toward introducing an offense of corporal punishment into the penal code, following the example of what certain countries, and particularly Sweden since 1979, have already done. He asked her whether the governmental powers had any plans for raising awareness of this issue. In Switzerland the debate over parents' right to use violence (smacks, slaps, spankings) to correct their children was recently reopened (July 9, 2003) by a Federal Court decision which stated that "repeated hitting that is indicative of habit could not be justified in the name of parents' right to correct and discipline." It was, unfortunately, an ambiguous ruling, for the Federal Court said that parents of course have the right to give their child a slap now and again, on the condition that this "right of correction" "always follows unsuitable behavior" and occurs "with a disciplinary objective." All parents who hit their children believe themselves to be acting "with a disciplinary objective." And when we are truly serious about banning certain behavior, like breaking the speed limit, for example, are we content to ban only that which is "repeated and indicative of habit"?

Eastern Europe All of the former communist countries receive more or less the same evaluation from the Committee in terms of corporal punishment. The measurements taken are inadequate throughout the region, statistics virtually non-existent. In Poland a survey conducted in 1998 found that 14% of 12-year-olds have been

physically punished by their parents in a manner causing lasting trauma (Médecins du Monde, March 2000). In Russia, the first report, from October 1992, underscored a growing number of child-cruelty victims and in particular their extremely young age. Thirty percent of children hospitalized following abuse were less than a year old. Another 30% were pre-schoolers, with the remaining 40% being of school age. Fifty thousand children, moreover, had run away from home on account of mistreatment, and close to 20,000 had run away from foster homes for the same reason. In Hungary, a survey carried out by the TÁRKI firm shows that the majority of Hungarian families agree with corporal punishment as a means of disciplining children. Three-fourths of those surveyed say that parents have a right to apply it. Turning to the Republic of Turkmenistan, president-for-life and former Soviet apparatchik Saparmourad Niazov made himself perfectly clear on Radio Free Europe: "We must discipline our youth. Ibn Sina [Avicenna, poet-philosopher] would say that whoever seeks to raise his child well must beat him. It is like the fertilizer one uses in farming." (Le Monde 8/14/02). And most likely, his opinion is shared by the general public.

Southern Europe Two countries from this region, Croatia and Italy, have banned corporal punishment in the home. In Spain and in Portugal, as well as Macedonia and the countries of former Yugoslavia, corporal punishment is banned in the schools and judicial systems, though still tolerated in domestic family settings, where parents may "administer reasonable punishments to their children in moderation." In reality, like everywhere else, hitting has to leave serious after-effects for social services and the courts to get involved. [NOTE: Since this book's writing, Spain and Portugal have extended their corporal punishment bans to the home (2007).]

Africa

Because it is largely French-speaking, it is on Africa that it has been possible for me to gather the most information. We should not conclude that Africans are particularly violent. I just haven't been able to get as much information about the Americas or Asia. As we shall see, moreover, a good amount of the material below comes from African sources and point to a realization of how serious of the phenomenon of disciplinary violence is. First, a few general statements. In a compendium on psychological abuse, Togo psychologist Ferdinand Ezembé puts disciplinary violence in its cultural context: "With respect to raising children, there exists in African societies a rather widespread belief that one must prepare children to live in an environment that will be physically and psychologically hostile. . . Corporal punishment is thus a normal part of children's upbringing, and it is further used and legitimized by administrative, judicial et educational authorities. Parents who do otherwise are considered to be lax, or even negligent. According to a proverb of the Bassa people of Cameroon, if you want to raise your child well, treat him like a slave. Africans view physical punishment as virtuous teaching . . . Among the Wolof people of Senegal, 'teaching' and 'stick' are designated by the same noun: Yar. To avoid being compromised by sympathy for their children, Wolofs entrust their discipline to an uncle or a marabout [holy man], because according to an old proverb, 'strangers have no pity' . . . The practice of violence against children takes especially serious forms for juvenile delinquents. In Senegal, street children are referred to as human clutter. Michel Galy (1995) reports that in Zaire some passers-by do not hesitate to snuff out their cigarettes on the bodies of sleeping street children, they say, 'teach them to live'. These children are often whipped by police with methodical cruelty in a ritual to drive out their bad tendencies." Another African journalist, Ousmane Thiény, for his part, laments the fact that "a child is subject to corporal correction by any villager or close neighbor whatsoever who decides [the child] has committed a serious offense against custom. This could be refusing or failing to give a proper greeting, refusal to do an errand, uttering rude insults in the presence of elders, etc.". Meanwhile, Boubacar lssa Camara, a former teacher who once served as director of education and health for the Nigerian Ministry of Public Health, describes the general situation in Africa this way (Cahiers de la Réconciliation n° 4, 2000): He begins by acknowledging that "the use of violence in African education . . . does tremendous harm to young people. At Koranic school, the child starting at age three or four, has been a victim to some degree of corporal punishment, though nothing serious, of course." The "marabout," the religious teacher, very often goes around the circle formed by the students with a crop in his hand; whoever cannot recite their Sura best beware. The fear of the teacher, the stress that students go through when they pass by the teacher, is such that some of them may lose control of their sphincter. Fortunately, things are improving with the advent of young professors fresh from the madrasas, who are more modern, more learned, and better trained to teach. So this situation is

increasingly no more than a distant memory." But it probably tells us something about the high threshold of tolerance toward corporal punishment in Africa that Boubacar Issa Camara considers lashes of the crop, fear of which causes the children to urinate or defecate on themselves, to be "nothing serious"! He continues: "The modern European-style schools are no better off than the Koranic schools in terms of teacher conduct. The use of violence, whether verbal or physical, is a well-known phenomenon, although it is becoming less and less common. Alas, there are still teachers who do not hesitate to land blows on students for not having learned their material. Sometimes the teacher's reaction is strictly verbal, yet no less harmful. The teacher refers to his students as 'imbeciles' and pointedly makes fun of those who are having difficulty learning. Students are beaten, insulted, sent home for the day, because they did not sweep the playground before the resumption of classes." Boubacar Issa Camara then gives some specific examples of violence: "The child is made to kneel upon the foot of the blackboard for an hour because he has not learned his material. This position is so painful that the student, his whole body trembling, covered with sweat, tears streaming from his thoroughly reddened eyes, is ready to cry "help." The student is required to stand facing the sun, staring eyes-wide-open at the star. When you consider how bright the sun's rays are in Africa, the kind of harm this positioning can do to a child is obvious. Not only psychologically, but above all to his physical health. Other punishments: the child must crouch, put his arms under his knees and hold onto both ears. It is out of the question for his buttocks to touch the ground." In his book The African Child [alternately published as The Dark Child], African writer Camara Laye recounts the treatment he endured at the hands of older students put in charge by the school principal of making the younger students gather up leaves that were scattered across the school courtyard: "If the work was not going as quickly as the headmaster expected, the big boys, instead of giving us a helping hand, used to find it simpler to whip us with branches pulled from the trees. Now guava wood is regrettably flexible; skillfully handled, the springy switches used to whistle piercingly, and fall like flails of fire on our backsides. Our flesh stung and smarted, while tears of anguish sprang from our eyes and splashed on the rotting leaves at our feet." An ethnologist, Madame Ortigues [HYPERNOTE? Marie-Cécile Ortigues (www.cairn.info/revue-lecoq-heron-2008-3-page-119.htm)], belonging to an association dedicated to African street children, recounts, on the association's web site what students go through at certain Koranic schools: "If the child returns empty-handed [i.e., without money for the schoolmaster who has sent him out to beg or to labor], he is beaten quite severely; this can go as far as one hundred lashes with an electric cord. We have learned of the case of an eight-year-old child who died as a result . . . Plenty of children have told me proudly during a consult, 'my father hits me good.'" Some African sayings are also telling. When parents entrust their child to a master for whom he will be an apprentice, at times they will say to him: The flesh is yours, and the bones are ours, a remark which

serves to grant authorization to hit the child up to a certain point. To the teacher at a Koranic school, parents may say: You kill him, and I'll bury him. Another saying: It takes a stick to make the goat walk. One cannot help but second the rallying cry of Ousmane Thiény, who in an impassioned plea to renounce corporal punishment, this "crime against childhood," writes: "To the adage 'Spare the Rod, spoil the child,' we should counter, 'Spare the rod, protect the child.'"

Northern Africa The reports made by these nations typically have an optimism that borders on the Pollyannaish. "Families never engage in physical abuse," "children blossom in a climate of affection", "abuse is very rare." But the reality appears to be quite different. The Moroccan report, for example, assured that "the problem [of physical punishment] was linked to levels of economic and social development." But, in Stolen Lives, by Malika Oufkir, we learn that the king himself--whose "level of socio-economic development" can hardly be blamed--subjected her over a trivial matter to the torture of the falaka, which consisted of beating the soles of her feet with a cudgel while she was slung across a slave's back. This same king, Hassan II, writes in his Mémoires: "Up until the age of ten or twelve years, I received strokes of the cane, and I was glad that it was my Father giving them rather than someone else . . . You know, to this day in the Koranic schools, the fquih [traditional schoolmaster] always carries a rod. It is applied to the wrists, preferably. I have showed the same parental severity toward my own children, and by God's grace I have not had problems raising them. You should never make appeals to logic with children, because you are demanding a level of reasoning that is beyond their mind's ability and of which they do not always grasp the purpose. When you make arguments to them, they will think that you are trying to negotiate. Simply put, with children at that age, you must, as Pascal would say, bend the machine, and treat them as animals. It is only later that they will be able to understand you and will no longer interpret such discussion as a sign of weakness." The punishment of the falaka was being inflicted at school, in the early 80's (as related by a Moroccan student). A system of tourniquets would secure the ankles of the students who were to be punished onto a wooden bar, so that the teacher could readily strike the soles of their feet. Practiced by a father upon his son in the Tunisian film Halfaouine, l'enfant des terrasses, it is probably common throughout the Maghreb region. As something administered to prisoners, it has been rightly denounced. Why does no one say anything about it when administered to children? Falaka was also once practiced in a highly ritualized manner in the Jewish families of Tunisia, often by the father and the rabbi at the same time, each seeing to one of the child's feet. On June 30, 2002, the journal Libération de Casablanca released the results of a study among children aged 3-15 conducted by an NGO and published by UNICEF. It was revealed that 72% of Moroccan

students were subjected to physical punishments. Other results, probably from questions directed to the children, put the percentage at 85%, and this despite corporal punishment being formally banned in the schools. After presenting this report, a UNICEF representative expressed hope for the establishment of a "child-friendly" school. In Tunisia a survey performed by a group of pediatricians among 70 parents from the culturally traditional population in the Sousse region found that 80% of them had been beaten as children. 64% of them thought this had been positive for their upbringing. The authors of the survey noted: "Beating a child, much like beating one's wife, is considered to be a given." They also said that they had compiled a number of adages extolling the beneficial effects of the stick.

West Africa Nation reports show that corporal punishment is applied in the majority of these countries, both at home and at school. Benin, Mali, and Senegal, which have officially banned it in the schools, acknowledge that in fact "traditional social norms continue to encourage resort to such punishment" and "corporal punishment is not banned in Senegal, because the Senegalese society holds that if discipline is to be effective, punitive measures must be allowed". Article 285 of the Family Code grants anyone having parental authority the right to impose punishments and reprimands to a degree commensurate with the child's age and the correction of its behavior. A study done at a hospital in Senegal recorded only a few acts of violence against infants. Most of the children concerned are between 11 and 15 years (70.45 %), primarily male (57.95%), with the skull being the most frequent injury site (40.74%). Ferdinand Ezembé, who reports these facts, points out also that 36% of elementary school teachers still admit to using physical correction to punish students. The "punitive measures" in certain Koranic schools involve chaining up the children, shackles on their feet, sometimes for several months, and inserting hot embers into their ears, which burns the eardrum. In Mali a survey of four elementary schools and four middle schools found that 39% of girl students have been subjected to corporal punishment. In Niger, according to a study done in a hospital's ophthalmology department, 26.4% of treated eye traumas were due to women and children being slapped. In Niger the report of official non-governmental organizations and other groups on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (September 2001), protection from maltreatment is a right recognized by the Constitution, and the penal code in theory protects the child from all forms abuse or violence. "However, corporal punishment is still practiced in the family setting and in the Koranic schools, and legal redress course from the courts over such treatment is virtually non-existent. It is the same story for young girls forced into arranged marriages, who are suffering emotionally and physically from acts of bodily violence against them.” The delegate from Togo, meanwhile, "assured the Committee that concerned professionals in Togo were aware of such issues and resorted to very light corporal punishment only on rare occasions." But the testimony of a holy woman from this country does

not affirm such optimism: "Numerous parents attribute their personal success to the many blows and other maltreatments that were practiced in their day. It is difficult to say what percentage of parents use corporal punishment to discipline their children. They are yet unable to conceive of discipline that does not rely on it. The children who are severely beaten the most are servant girls (6 to 15 years) and young apprentices (9 to 17 years) . . . In some churches, you might see adults provided with a stick to keep order among a group of children. We are still a long way from having dialog, understanding, and affection take the place of sticks." A survey by the International Federation for Children's Rights (FIDE for its initials in French) concludes that 96% of children are coming under disciplinary violence. This organization embarked in March 2004 on a campaign against corporal punishment: circulation of a manifesto against disciplinary violence, circulation of this book, and television appearances. In Ghana corporal punishment is "institutionalized . . . as a means of discipline, particularly in schools," and the teachers' manual gives them license to use strokes of the cane as a disciplinary measure. The same manual, published by the Ministery of Education, states that corporal punishment can be inflicted as a last resort, even though it points teachers toward various forms of discipline other than corporal punishment. The delegate from Ghana furthermore adds: "There had recently been suggestions in the press that such punishment should be reintroduced in certain schools. However, efforts had been made to make the Ministry of Education realize that such practices were in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Rules could not be imposed on schools; it was possible only to advocate a particular point of view and to hope that schools would heed it. In the past, any pupil could be caned by a teacher. Following protests, it had been decided that only head teachers might inflict caning and that particulars of the case should be recorded and be approved by inspectors." The delegate from Ghana recognized that "corporal punishment was practiced, and even encouraged, in Ghana." Article 41 a) of this country's penal code authorizes parents or those having custody of a child to inflict physical violence on him "within reason." Nonetheless, as one of the Committee members emphasized, "most child abuse begins with a use of force for disciplinary purposes," and "the harmful effects of corporal punishment had been well documented." In Guinea the penal code officially prohibits corporal punishment, but during the same session, the Guinean delegate reports that corporal punishment has effectively been banned in "almost all of the public and private schools" (session of 1/27/99), which puts the first claim into perspective. The Guinean delegate acknowledges that "violence was a problem of significant concern in Guinean society: parents must be encouraged to understand that a child who was brought up in an atmosphere of violence inevitably grew up to be violent and that, in order to lead a successful and happy life, a child must be brought up in a peaceful home." Their government was to make efforts to bring "a sense of harmony and equilibrium into Guinean family life." In Sierra Leone according to this country's delegate (session of 1/20/2000), "corporal punishment is not much practiced today. In the schools, no teacher other than the principal has authority to impose this punishment, and only female teachers may mete it out to girls." In reality, as the Committee attests,

"corporal punishment remains widespread" in the home and at school. So it was that in May 1997, supposedly in response to a rise of criminal behavior influenced by American music and movies, students who were following American fashion trends by braiding their hair or wearing earrings, were publicly flogged and then sent home.

East Africa In this region, government attitudes are very mixed. One country, Kenya, has banned school corporal punishment, while another, Tanzania, is close to doing so, despite resistance from the population and often from teachers. There is likewise resistance in Zambia, where people don't want to "imitate the ways of Westerners who have problems with delinquents." When two Zambian children in October 1999 had their limbs nearly broken by their teacher for playing hooky, they did not complain, nor was there any protest by their parents, their schoolmates, or the general public. Tanzania, in its 1994 report, stated that the government had undertaken to create an African movement for the prevention of and protections against child mistreatment, suggesting a certain degree of awareness of the problem. It also referred to "violence within the family" as one of the factors leading children to live on the street or to do labor despite their age. Since that time, there appear to be signs of growing awareness, as in December 1997 the Chinese news wire service Xinhua was reporting: "[Tanzanian] authorities, who signed the Charter on the Rights of the Child, have woken up to the traumatic effects of corporal punishment and to the obvious abuses to which teachers' license to hit inevitably leads. Indeed, participants at a workshop on corporal punishment in the elementary schools discovered that children were being beaten for infractions such as arriving late to class, giving wrong answers, or not wearing the school uniform. Many children have also been beaten for their parents' inability to pay tuition fees, or for no reason at all." The last news to be heard (March 2000) was that the government would soon to put an end to school corporal punishment. In Tanzania, the government report acknowledges that "violence within the family" puts many children out on the street or off to work in spite of their age; they dare not return home. The report out of the Comoros gives an idea of the violent/brutal punishments used in certain Koranic schools: "Some teachers chose to punish 'bad pupils' by inflicting a humiliating punishment which consists of marching them half-naked through the village, their faces smeared with mud or soot, and forcing them to wear a necklace made of snails' shells . . . Dressed in the manner described above and jeered by the other children, the child being punished is made to shout out his misdeed." This punishment is "frequently preceded by beatings, wet stinging nettle baths and exposure to the sun after being coated in sugar cane syrup . . . generations of Koranic teachers have perpetuated a tradition which views the child as a wayward being who needs to be 'subdued' through the use of force and corporal punishment."

Kenya fairly recently abolished corporal punishment in the schools. The decision was possibly made easier by the fact that caning was seen as a legacy of the British empire: "When we were under British rule, those who refused to pay taxes or those who did not obey the rules were caned in public" (source: Lawrence Kahindi Majali, deputy general secretary of Kenya's national teachers' union). On the other hand, the violence of corporal punishment in this country is such that in the late 90's, at least six students had died from it in four years. Strokes of the cane are not only routine in the schools, but some students have even been seriously injured: "bruises and cuts, broken bones, knocked-out teeth and internal bleeding," we learn from the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), based in New York, in a recent report entitled Spare the Child: Corporal Punishment in Kenyan Schools. Based on a field study (several dozen interviews with students, teachers, parents, and administrators), HRW's report underscores how Kenyan children are often punished for minor infractions, for instance, tardiness or wearing a torn uniform. The consequences of this are serious. According to a recent study, the rate of school attendance is falling sharply. Today, only 42% of those who begin elementary school continue all the way through. The researchers believe that this drop is due to, among other factors, poverty and a hostile school environment. "Some students told us that they dropped out of school because of severe beating by their teachers,” reports Yodon Thonden. “This is in clear violation of children's right to education." Victims often come from the countryside, where people lack the means to hire a lawyer to argue their case, and where legal aid is limited. Moreover, "In rural areas, parents don't formally object to their children being beaten for fear they [the children] might be victimized further," says Mwakish So far no teacher has been convicted for these deaths," observes journalist Jemimah Mwakisha, who has written long articles on the subject for Kenya's largest daily paper, the Daily Nation. It is very rare for a professor to be convicted of assault and battery. In some cases, recalls Jemimah Mwakisha, teachers brought before the courts were not sanctioned because it was impossible to ascribe a provable motive, as required under penal law. Kenya's Ministry of Education has officially denied HRW's allegations, accusing them of blowing a few isolated incidents out of proportion. But in private, a high-ranking ministry official acknowledges that the report was "more or less correct" Teachers "brutally beat children in many schools without any proper reason," he adds. "This is a practice that can only be stopped by abolishing corporal punishment altogether." In Rwanda finally, according to a friend from Cameroon who questioned Rwandan academics, disciplinary violence toward children is extreme. A Rwandan member of a religious order wrote to Alice Miller that children are "beaten far and wide, even at school and sometimes, alas, by our own religious teachers. It is a widespread element of the culture here: a child must be 'trained' with 'force.'" Zambia defended the use of corporal punishment at school until just recently. The Ministry of Education declared itself on August 31, 1999, to have no intention of abolishing it. In the minister's view, corporal punishment is "a means of cracking down that should be used in rare cases to correct undisciplined

students." Teachers and parents alike tend to feel that without corporal punishment, children will misbehave at school: "Much as we might like to imitate the civilized peoples of the West, let us drop this nonsense about human rights, or else we are going to raise undisciplined children. We strike every one of our children at home because we believe it straightens them up. If we thought there were other effective methods, we would use them," asserts a private schoolmistress in Lusaka. One headmaster declares that parents are counting on teachers to discipline the schoolchildren: "Some parents come to see me with their children and ask me to hit them because they're misbehaving at home." One student's parent, when asked about the subject, feels that corporal punishment is a good punishment as long as it doesn't leave injury marks on the child's body. As he sees it, if such punishment is abolished, children will be able to haul their parents into court for striking them. He adds: "Let's not take up Western ways, with all the delinquency problems they have." As far as he's concerned, Zambian culture considers corporal punishment to be a good disciplinary measure and not a human rights violation. Any move against it would be a collective abdication of responsibility. By contrast, his wife, a special education tutor, would like to see corporal punishment abolished and proposes alternative punishments such as loss of privileges, detention hall, and chores. In October 1999, two Zambian children had their limbs nearly broken by their teacher for playing hooky. They were hospitalized with severe injuries. Yet neither they nor their parents made a complaint. As far as their classmates are concerned, these two had simply been punished for skipping school. There was no outcry or public debate when the incident was mentioned in the press. Lavu Malimba, president of the Permanent Human Rights Commission (PHRC) thinks that "people will simply have to be made less complacent and shown that corporal punishment is inhumane." The PHRC and the Zambia Law Development Commission (ZLDC), who view corporal punishment as a "cruel, dehumanizing, and degrading" practice, both call for repeal of the amendment to the Education Act which authorizes corporal punishment and states that only in African customary law is it as a crime. For the ZLDC, corporal punishment is in contradiction with the Zambian Constitution and international legal instruments such as the convention on torture which Zambia has signed. But all that appears to be in for a change following a decision passed in early May of 2000. A judgment which sentenced a young man of 19 years to ten strokes of the cane for vandalism was struck down on appeal, the judge having ruled that this punishment, "brutal relic of English law, which was applied only to blacks, goes against the Constitutional ban on inhuman and degrading punishment." This judgment would presumably have to be upheld by the Supreme Court and apply to the schools as well. Equally damning is the account of a Swiss teacher who taught in Zambia for a few semesters (Corinne Moesching, source: ProtestInfo): "The young girl walked into the teacher's lounge covered in blood, visibly shaken. As I was getting her to lie down, I saw that she had a head wound that would need several stitches. Despite the medical report, the professor who had struck her was not prosecuted . . . Sometimes, an entire class would be beaten, and I could hear the swish of the cane in the next room . . . The teachers, underpaid as they were and under lax management, would hit the students with whatever they could lay their hands on: blackboard erasers, canes, rubber rods." A witness against her will, this longtime teacher tried to do something: "I was the only one who dared to speak up; even the parents

keep quiet for fear their children will be attacked further. As for me, I was fast made to understand that I shouldn't be meddling." Powerless in view of this situation, the teacher decided to quickly end her term and went back to Switzerland. In Congo-Kinshasa, on World Mental Health Day 2002 (October 29), whose theme that year was "The Effects of Trauma and Violence on Children and Adolescents," the health minister, Dr. Mashako Mamba lamented that parents and other adults, especially in the Republic of Congo, were creating a daily environment of trauma and violence against children. This is what drives these children to wander the streets. "From our homes, from our churches, from our schools, and from learning centers and the like, we are putting thousands of children out into the street. Let us make a real commitment to reduce this violence against children," he urged Congolese adults. His plea to children was not only that they stand up for their rights, but also that they avoid violence and not copy the adults, thereby stopping the endless chain of violence (Le Phare - Kinshasa, 10/30/02, article by Guy-Marin Kamandji). In Ethiopia the Civil Code expressly permits parents to inflict, by way of discipline, "mild corporal punishment" on their children. There is reason to hope, however, that an awakening will come about in this country thanks the association of Ethiopian psychologists who, during a seminar organized on January 15, 1999, by the leader of the upper house of Ethiopian parliament, denounced the use of corporal punishment and suggested that parents and teachers stop these practices, which he said were prohibited by the new state Constitution.

Central Africa Especially in Chad but also in the other countries of the region, "corporal punishment is standard practice in the traditional education of children"; "There had been some tradition in Koranic and even Christian schools that such punishment contributed to a child's development and education . . ." The government has tried to ban it, but is running into strong resistance, particularly from the Koranic schools. In Burundi authorities recognize that "children are more often the victims than the originators of violence" and that "the reality is that children are subjected to cruelty and ill treatment." But they would have us believe that this is "often at the hands of parents who are in distress, or unfit to be parents, or alcoholics," which amounts to concealment, as is often the case, of the enormous problem of corporal punishment underlying abuses singled out by the justice system. In Cameroon there is a Bassa proverb: "If you want raise your child well, treat him like a slave." Sadly, this proverb appears to have been put into practice, as an extensive survey conducted by the Cameroonian association EMIDA (whose full name translates as "Eliminating Domestic Child Abuse in Africa" [TFN: since changed to "Education for Personal Well-Being and Development of

Aftica"]) with backing from UNICEF, revealed that 83.9% of parents said they used caning to discipline their children; 90.6% said they had been caned at home; 90.3% of teachers reported using the cane in the classroom; 96% of children reported having been caned in class; 21 children (out of 2059 children interviewed) reported never having been beaten at home or school. Beatings are inflicted with rods, canes, dense creeper plants (la chicotte) or an electric cord. One student from this same country, facing punishment by the disciplinary board, was expelled from the vocational school in Mefomo, at the beginning of April 1999, because he would not submit to receive 155 (one hundred and fifty-five!) strokes of the cane on the soles of his feet. For several years, however, physical abuse in the classroom has officially been outlawed in Cameroon. In Nigeria the national representative, in the October 1996 session, affirmed that "[School] corporal punishment was not permitted by the legislation of any State" (Nigeria is a federation), but that in fact, "cultural influences meant that it did take place here and there. Where corporal punishment was administered in a school, it was strictly controlled and the school's own advisory board would have defined the circumstances in which it could be used." But, in July 1999, corporal punishment was reinstated under the pretext of unacceptably poor levels of discipline. Teachers thus have license to flog children. Unlike in the past, however, "canings" are not to be inflicted by one's own schoolmates (Express postal, Lagos, July 10, 1999). In Uganda in 1996, corporal punishment was still being meted out. The nation's representative, however, lamented that students in every school were being whipped by teachers when only the principal of a school was authorized to impose corporal punishment. "Sometimes this takes a serious dimension resulting in injury. There is a need to take serious measures to curb this illegal and degrading practice which is not consistent with the children's rights and dignity . . . At present a child under the age of 16 can be given corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is offensive, infringes the rights of the child and it does not promote the child's sense of dignity. The draft bill for the Children's Statute has outlawed corporal punishment or caning as a form of punishment in the children and family court." The following year, a law was passed that ran counter to public opinion, which remains quite supportive of corporal punishment. During the session of 10/2/1997, the representative from Uganda stated that his country's government "had revised the school syllabus to include more tuition on children's rights and the Ministry of Education was likewise alive to the need to contribute to a safe school environment which respected the rights of the child. Consequently, corporal punishment in schools had been abolished despite stiff opposition owing to traditional attitudes in the community; alternative methods were being tried out. Children were readier to report attempts by teachers to hit or sexually abuse them, as the young people realized not only that such behavior was wrong, but that they could take action to halt it. In addition, community sensitization and mobilization programs had opened parents' eyes to the issue." However, not long after (October 7, 1997 session), the government representative tempered this optimism by declaring that caning "was a practice of long-standing and it would be some time before it actually disappeared." The facts have largely borne out those comments.

Parents are pressuring teachers to return to this method of discipline. And their voices have apparently been heard, considering that in April 1999, fifty students were beaten by their teachers for not running as well as they were expected to (Le Moniteur, Kampala, April 7, 1999). But this hard-line stance of the Ugandan government is quite rare and so deserves to be highlighted.

Southern Africa In the Republic of South Africa corporal punishment in the past was systematically applied in accordance with well-established rules. Disobedience and tardiness, but also smoking, were punishable by caning or flogging. These punishments were sometimes so brutal that in March 1997, an 18-year-old student tried to commit suicide by offering himself up to the lions at a nature reserve, rather than take the chance of being beaten once again by teachers who had inflicted sixty strokes of the cane upon him. And if the director of a Salvation Army center in 1972 saw his name and picture in the newspaper, it wasn't for having beaten several children at the center, but because he first made them take down their pants. In 1997, "The Constitutional Court ruled that corporal punishment of children as a sentence imposed by courts was a violation of the right to freedom from 'cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.' The Abolition of Corporal Punishment Act (1997) outlaws such sentences. Corporal punishment of children has also been prohibited in the South African Schools Act (1996) and is now a criminal offence. Parents retain common law powers of moderate chastisement, as part of the parental power. Corporal punishment in institutions falling under the Child Care Act (1983) is still permissible in terms of its regulations. Legally, corporal punishment may no longer be imposed upon persons in prison for infractions of prison disciplinary rules." (5/22/98 report). The New Domestic Violence Act, which went into effect in December of 1999, allows a child to directly seek protection, without requiring his parents' assistance (2/2/2000 session). Some pilot programs were set up to help parents rely on negotiation rather than physical punishment. Plenty of teachers, though, still believe in the three T's--Teach, Try, Thrash--as the sole means of restoring order. A Christian organization representing 196 schools and 14,500 students sued to win the preservation of corporal punishment ("Biblical chastisement"), which it considers part of their constitutional right to religious and cultural freedom. On August 18, 2000, however, the Constitutional Court of South Africa upheld the ban. The Xhosa people of Africa also claim corporal punishment as part of their culture. In Namibia many teachers and parents complain about the government's prohibition, so much so that at one school without major discipline problems, a father came demanding that his child be beaten. The teachers provided him with a cane, which he used to beat the child in their presence. In Swaziland corporal punishment is still sanctioned. But in September 1999, after a twelve-year-old student lost an eye because a teacher had hit her with a tree branch, the president of the Youth Congress,

Bongani Masuku, called for a ban on corporal punishment (to no avail, apparently). (Source: South African Press Association, Sept. 29, 1999). In Botswana, where the cane is still used to impose discipline, a great many teachers feel that if corporal punishment is "applied lovingly," then it's not abuse (according to the March 10, 1999 edition of a local newspaper). The same attitude is found in Madagascar, whose representative is well aware that "Cruelty and illtreatment of children are facts of life in Madagascar," though he adds this questionable aside: "(unfit or alcoholic parents, poverty, etc.)," when clearly this is a matter of traditional customs. While "teachers, educationists, and lawyers are taking awareness-raising classes concerning children's rights", "children's rights have begun" only "to be taught in the primary schools," and "programs to educate adults as to their responsibilities are also planned." Following 16 years of civil war in Mozambique (1976-1992), terror had been institutionalized by the FRELIMO [Liberation Front of Mozambique]. After the war, the FRELIMO stated that it was going to win the next elections and even the ones after that, because "when a mother beats her child, the child then cuddles up to her"! This notion, which has a proverbial ring to it, should occasion some reflection. It illustrates both a child's attachment to his mother, no matter how she treats it, and the cynical Machiavellianism that capitalizes so shrewdly on the reflexes created by disciplinary violence in order to maintain a political order. In Zimbabwe, the Supreme Court had decided in 1989 to eliminate corporal punishment in the schools, but between that time and 1996, the government reinstated it in the Constitution. "The law allows for use of corporal punishment at school as well within the family" (June 7, 1996 report). But incidents of maltreatment are deemed "not very common." The country's representative (February 4,1997 session) indicated that "Children playing a part in school management" "by drawing the attention of those in charge of the schools to students' concerns" had brought about "an overall decrease in the number of corporal punishments meted out". These punishments, however, are arranged to be "a sort of ceremony in the headmaster's presence and with the punished child's name recorded in a ledger. The situation is built up for dramatic effect, and the student is placed under a permanent cloud of shame, which, as the Committee notes, goes against provisions in Article 28, paragraph 2 of the Convention". On the question of how proportionate the blows are, "it depends, as the delegate acknowledges, not on the seriousness of the offense, but rather on the mood of the person delivering the punishment in question". The Committee also suggests that Zimbabwe follow "the example of Namibia, which has banned corporal punishment in the schools and instructs teachers in how to avoid it." But the Zimbabwean authorities are inclined to attribute "violence committed within the family" to violent content on television, though it was occurring long before television existed!

Finally, it appears that in several African countries, as mentioned earlier, women who carry their babies on their back customarily spank them in their first weeks of life in order to condition them into cleanliness, each time they answer nature's call, until they make a habit of signaling their urges by crying. This way the mothers can put them on the ground before getting soiled. How are these women to know the negative consequences of treating a baby this way if nobody educates them?

The Americas

Central America and Mexico All over the region, as in Mexico, "physical and sexual abuse - within and outside the family - is a serious problem." In Costa Rica, corporal punishment is "part of the culture" and "remains regarded as socially acceptable." In Honduras, and most likely in the other nations as well, the problem is so serious that family violence is considered to be a factor in children being "forced to live in and/or work on the streets." Also throughout the region, "the notion seemed to persist that [children] were not autonomous individuals, but the property of the family." Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua have taken steps to try to limit corporal punishment. Other countries, on the contrary, stress children's duty to respect and obey their parents while overlooking parents' duty to respect their children. In Belize, during a consultation on the Convention, many parents expressed fears that their parental rights would be restricted, especially when it comes to corporal punishment. In Nicaragua, a law was passed in 1996 to try to curb the use of physical punishment. The country's representative, however, acknowledged that "with the mindset so entrenched that children are their parents' property, it will take more than legislation to eradicate these practices." In Guatemala, "The ill-treatment of children appeared to be endemic . . . where the notion seemed to persist that they were not autonomous individuals, but the property of the family." Family violence is mistakenly attributed to "decades of conflict affecting society [that] have resulted in the frequent use of violence, including within the family." As if it took conflicts and wars for parents to smite their children! In Ecuador, physical punishment is "a culturally accepted and justified practice" that is "linked to a tradition of educational discipline," and its use could even be described, as one member of the Committee put it, as a "culture of violence toward children in the family." Another Committee member notes, "On the issue of child abuse, punishment of children in schools appeared to be condoned by families to the extent that some parents expressly asked teachers to make sure their children were punished properly." In May of 1998, the government created a "Commission for the Elimination of Maltreatment of Children." [UN translation of original French] In El Salvador, the initial report finds that "those who commit abuse are most often mothers than fathers." This could be in part because women are often the heads of households. In any case, it cannot be denied that for reasons largely unclear, women are doing their part to perpetuate machismo." (Session of October 5, 1993).

Carribean In all the nations of this region, "occurrence of child abuse and neglect within the family are matters of concern." A Committee member speaks of a veritable "tradition of violence" prevailing in this region. In 1999 in the Bahamas, in a school for Seventh Day Adventists, a 12-year-old boy was struck 70 times with a cane. The reporting of this punishment by the press spurred a debate in April of that same year, after which "caning" was abolished. But use of the flat ruler remains "normal." The Supreme Court of Barbados recently issued a judgment recognizing the right of teachers to impose corporal punishment on children (Report of 2/11/97). Corporal punishment can be imposed at school "as part of the disciplinary procedure. However, such force must be no more than is reasonably necessary in all circumstances." A Committee member wondered, "What happened when the reasonable limits which were difficult to establish - were exceeded by teachers?" The representative from Barbados then explained that "the current law in Barbados under the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act still referred to ‘moderate chastisement’ - a somewhat subjective concept - as a method of punishment and discipline. A number of cases had been brought before the courts and in most of them it had been decided that the punishment had been so excessive as to constitute physical abuse. However, in other cases it had been decided that if, for example, the child's skin had not been broken or he or she had been only moderately bruised, that constituted moderate chastisement." To which another member, Mrs. Karp, responded that "if courts found that, as long as the child's bones were not broken, moderate chastisement rather than abuse had taken place, that would impede efforts to create an atmosphere of non-violence." The government of Barbados, however, says it is committed to "continue to work energetically towards the abolition of corporal punishment"; it considers "corporal punishment to be a harmful and counterproductive practice, were encouraging parents to use other methods of education and discipline and to establish an ongoing dialogue with their children from a very early age. Day nurseries and schools were strongly discouraged from having recourse to corporal punishment." Nonetheless, corporal punishment was "still advocated as an educational method by some of the country's religious authorities." The worst part is that some black families originally from Barbados who reside in Great Britain are shipping their children back because they feel that English schools lack discipline and because the Barbadan school system includes flogging. It is applied for, among other things, not paying attention and wearing jewelry or makeup (Times, July 15, 1996). The delegate from Belize qualified that "no customary practices harmful to children other than corporal punishment existed in Belize [emphasis added]." The representative of the Belizean government also stressed that "during the consultations held in connection with the Convention, many parents had expressed the fear of having their parental rights restricted, especially with regard to corporal punishment." "The Ministry of Education's School Rules provided for corporal punishment as a last resort" (administered only by the principal) "in a way that would not cause bodily harm to the student".

As one Committee member commented, "That limit was very difficult to respect." (Session of January 22, 1999). In Bermuda, the government decided in June of 1996 to keep corporal punishment in its schools. It is thus permitted to give four strokes with a cane or strap. Vincent Fontana, an American pediatrician, strongly condemned this measure, adding that problems in school stem from family situations. The director of a private school, Sister Judith Rollo, agreed wholeheartedly and went so far as to say that it is the parents who should go to school to learn how to raise their children (Bermuda Sun, June 14th and 21st). With regard to Cuba, the Committee found it difficult to share the official optimism of this nation's representatives, who declare that "corporal punishment in schools did not exist, was prohibited and had never been authorized," that "although violence within the family did not constitute a significant social problem in Cuba, prevention mechanisms and sanctions had been established for individual cases that might arise." Facing skepticism, the Cuban representative would only concede, "Although Cuban parents had of course sometimes been prosecuted for inflicting corporal punishment on their children, that was not a widespread problem." (Session of May 26, 1997). It would be nice to believe so. In Grenada, an effort to ban school corporal punishment has run into opposition from churches and from parents. Corporal punishment is accepted in families, sometimes in extreme forms. "Corporal punishment had been eliminated in the draft Education Act, although the Act had not yet become law . . . there was considerable resistance from churches and from parents. The video 'Olivia's Plight' was used as a means of encouraging alternative sanctions. It showed that an abused child might become an adult abuser and that the approach of zero tolerance of violence against women must go hand in hand with the abolition of corporal punishment." (Session of February 28, 2000). In Haiti, a survey by the Haitian Childhood Institute (IHE), the results of which were made public in February 2002, revealed that Haitians are still attached to corporal punishments. Nine out of ten adults consider it normal to spank children who will not obey. An association of jurists is preparing to begin a campaign to fight disciplinary violence. In Jamaica, "the occurrence of child abuse and neglect within the family are [a matter] of concern." A debate over corporal punishment in the schools prompted an article in the January 30, 1997 edition of the Jamaica Gleaner, a Kingston newspaper, in which the author naively comes to the defense of school corporal punishment based on having endured it himself. He does not think that "a sore behind for a few days is likely to unhinge [schoolboys]." In his judgment, he has "no tendency to violence", and yet . . . he sees nothing wrong with "caning" children. As for the Committee on the Rights of the Child, it pointed out that it is not enough to ban the "excessive" punishment of children. "We might ask where the line is drawn between excessive and tolerable and what we would say to a law authorizing husbands to get violent with their wives, provided that the violence is not 'excessive.'"

In the Dominican Republic, "the physical, psychological and sexual abuse of children, adolescents and women constitutes a serious public health problem." On Saint Kitts and Nevis, "the use of corporal punishment is still widespread," and the delegate acknowledged that "it was not going to disappear soon." More than half the population at least are in favor of corporal punishment. In Trinidad and Tobago, Committee member Mrs. Sardenberg "had been struck by the culture of violence in the country and by the prevalence of corporal punishment, domestic violence and criminality." The delegate "confirmed that no study had so far been made of the issue [of corporal punishment], as there was still no unanimous agreement, either nationally or regionally, as to whether the Convention took precedence over domestic law in that sphere, an issue which had both social and cultural implications." "The Ministry of Social Development was liaising with the Ministry of Education and had undertaken a number of initiatives at the community level to convey the message that corporal punishment was not in line with the principles of the Convention or modern child rearing practices. It was nonetheless difficult to change attitudes, particularly in the generation of parents aged between 60 and 70; government efforts alone would not suffice and greater involvement by civic and religious society was required." According to the September 30, 1999 edition of the Trinidad Express, a father forgave a teacher for whipping his son with a belt, illegally it would seem. The following day in the same newspaper, a teacher expressed what may well be the viewpoint of many of his colleagues: "Brutality against children is abhorrent but children intuitively understand human dynamics better than Machiavelli ever did, and sometimes -- not most or all of the time, but sometimes -- the ruler or the strap makes a necessary point much more efficiently than gentle persuasion could ever do." In the penal system, finally, flogging is an authorized method of discipline at prison facilities. "Male offenders no older than 16 years may be sentenced to flogging in place of any other sentence. The offender may receive up to six strokes if he is 12 years old or younger and up to 12 strokes if he is more than 12 years old. The penalty must be applied in a single occasion and within one month's time."

South America For a great many children in Latin America, the family appears to be a high-risk environment. Such is the case in Bolivia, where maltreatment "[constitutes] a social phenomenon of considerable magnitude with serious consequences." In Ecuador, it is "culturally accepted and justified practice" which is "linked to a tradition of educational discipline" and whose practice might even be characterized, to use one Committee member's phrasing, as a "culture of child abuse in families."

In Peru, it is an "acceptable method of correction" and affects 60% of children according to some sociologists. In Bolivia, the country which provided the most detailed report, the authors actually talk of "adult xenophobia towards the new generations." Statistical tables show that 60% of Bolivian children are subjected to ill-treatment in their family, mainly from mothers (48%): strapping or belt-whipping: 18%; ear-pulling: 11%; hitting with sticks or stones: 6%; slapping: 6%; lashing with a hosepipe or rope: 5%; kicking: 5%; pinching: 4%; punching: 3%; knife attacks or other: 2% (Source: Under-Secretariat of Generational Affairs). "Most of those maltreated in the home (79 per cent) consider, however, that punishment is a good thing because it teaches them something, is intended for their betterment and makes them think, which strongly suggests that they themselves will similarly maltreat their own children when they grow up." In Colombia, the incidence of abuse sends many children to life on the streets. At the urging of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, Colombia, Ecuador, and especially Bolivia have taken initiatives against corporal punishment.

North America North America has the sad distinction of including two of the three industrialized nations in the world that continue to have corporal punishment in its schools--the United States and Canada (the third would be Australia). In Canada, if we go by the writings of Suanne Kelman in her book, All in the Family: A Cultural History of Family Life (Penguin, 1998), it was the early French missionaries who, having encountered tribes that never struck their children, did all they could to "correct this heretical gentleness." They apparently were successful, as a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, (October 5, 1999) and looking at 4.888 people in Ontario between the ages of 15 and 64, found that 70 to 75% of Canadian parents spank their children. 41% of those interviewed said that they had been "rarely" hit or slapped, 34% "sometimes," 21% never, and 6% "often." But spanking is far more common in society than this survey shows, because children are hit the most between the age of eighteen months to four years old, in other words, too young for them to recall it as adults. According to Kenneth Goldberg, head of parent training and managing director of the Child and Family Center of Toronto, as well as a member of the national committee seeking the repeal of Section 43, "In Canada, children are the only citizens who do not enjoy security of person — a human right that women and convicted prisoners have come to enjoy." Physical punishment is in fact banned by the Civil Code. But the Canadian Criminal Code contains a section (Section 43), entered into the Penal Code in1892, which stipulates: "Every schoolteacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under his care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under

the circumstances." This section, which was once again declared constitutional in July 2000, has been used successfully to defend adults charged with mistreating children to the point of causing fractures, fist marks and bruises. The Canadian Federation of Teachers considers it necessary (a poll conducted in Ontario found moreover that 69% of teachers were in favor of spanking as a disciplinary measure Canadian Journal of Education 1994). The U.N. has already recommended that Canada withdraw this section, and the Quebec Human Rights Commission formally requested the same in February 1999. Some school boards in the meantime have banned corporal punishment (26 boards out of 65 in Alberta, for instance, the Herald-Tribune reported on 3/21/2000). The founder of the Repeal 43 Committee, Corinne Robertshaw, points out that at least 10,000 cases of physical abuse occur each year in the state of Ontario alone and that nearly all of them begin with attempts at "correction" by means of "reasonable" corporal punishment. This salient remark illustrates, if there was any doubt, that it is folly to try to keep within "reasonable" limits a behavior that is, at its core, anything but reasonable! Curiously, the Child Management Policy of July 1993 formally prohibits use of corporal punishment in foster families, which is cause for rejoicing, but it would suggest that there is some kind of "right of blood" to hit one's children! In the month of June 2000, court justices again refused to outlaw spanking. They called on lawmakers to clarify Section 43 of the Criminal Code, cited above (Globe and Mail, Toronto, June 6, 2000). In recent years, proponents of repealing Section 43 were hoping for things to change. But on January 30, 2004, the Supreme Court upheld by a vote of 6-3 the right of parents and educators to use force in correcting children. The only restrictions with respect to previous practices: such punishment can only be given to children above age two, and teens must also be spared to avoid their reacting with "aggressive or antisocial behavior"; face-slapping, blows to the head, and hitting with objects are prohibited. This decision, even if it reflects slight progress, could set back efforts toward an outright ban for several years to come. In the United States, spanking is still practiced at schools in 22 of the 50 states, generally with a board 20" long, 3.5" wide and 3/4" thick. Some five- and six-year-old children are beaten with this implement so hard that they often are left with bruises on their buttocks. On the other hand, 28 states have banned this practice. The first state to outlaw school corporal punishment was New Jersey in 1867, followed more than a century later by Massachusetts, in 1971. Delaware is the latest state to have taken this step in April 2003. [NOTE: Since this book's writing, Pennsylvania (2005) and Ohio (2009, with exemption for private schools) have banned school corporal punishment, bringing the number of non-paddling states to 30. Updated information is available from the Center for Effective Discipline (www.stophitting.org).] The pace of progress is increasing, but . . . slowly! The state of Mississippi tops the list when it comes to using corporal punishment. During the 1997 school year, 12.4% of students in Mississippi's public schools were spanked. Arkansas was the runner-up was, hitting 10.8% of its students. Next was Alabama with 6.3%. In total, about 2,500 students in were beaten each day in January 2000 in American schools. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is estimated that corporal punishment is administered between 1 and 2 millions times per year in the states where it is

used. A new era is dawning, however, since the U.S. Department of Education reports that the number of students beaten has gone from 1.4 million en 1979-80 (around 3.5% of children) to 613,000 in 198990, to 470,000 in 1993-94, and finally to 365,000 (0.8% of children) during the 1997-1998 school year. This reduction stems in part from the fact that in many states which authorize corporal punishment, certain districts have banned it. And in the schools that authorize it, parents have the option of requesting that their children be exempt from this form of punishment. Corporal punishment is more common in elementary and middle schools than in high schools. It is used more extensively in rural schools than in cities. Black children (17% of the American student population) comprise 39% of students who have been beaten. Black American youths have twice as much chance of being paddled as their white peers. 6% of black students receive corporal punishment at school, compared to 3% of whites. During his [first] presidential campaign, George Bush promised a Teacher Protection Act that would give teachers immunity from legal action taken by parents over cases of corporal punishment received by their children. In terms of parental punishments, it was estimated in 1985 that more than 90% of children were being hit by their parents. Another study indicated that roughly 80 percent of American parents spank their children. [Murray] Straus, author of Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families headed up a survey of 1000 mothers with children aged 2-4 years. 73% of them reported having spanked their children for repeated disobedience. Parents and educators generally base their support for corporal punishment upon two powerful foundations: the Bible and personal experience. "That's how it was when I grew up, and that's how it's always been in our society," "If you act up or do something bad, you get a whipping." Fundamentalist Christian movements are particularly fond of this practice. In one Christian magazine appears an ad for a 22-inch-long nylon whip called "The Rod." The ad explains that its purpose is for punishing children and quotes a proverb from the Bible. It is manufactured by an Oklahoma couple. But parents are not always cognizant of their own violence, as shown by the contradictions in certain surveys. Thus, in 1995, a slight majority of parents (55%) considered that it was "sometimes necessary" to spank a child, as opposed to 94% en 1968. But 94% of those surveyed reported having spanked their two- to five-year-olds in the past year. "The inconsistency between attitudes and prevalence rates is typical of the process of social change," the author of the study commented. American legal standards for determining whether physical punishment has crossed over into abuse are very lax. In theory, causing injury qualifies as abuse. But a woman who whipped her child with a belt was acquitted on the grounds that the child's condition did not require medical treatment. These rather disheartening figures which reveal that the vast majority of young people in North America have been subjected to corporal punishment at home and/or at school, or been threatened with it, should not, however, keep us from seeing the gradual change that is coming about in the U.S. due to the cumulative effect of shifting public opinion, the growing number of lawsuits against school boards and teachers, and the growing number of legislative bans. In the 18 years between 1976 and 1994, 25 states have done away with corporal punishment. In those states that allow it, many school boards are deciding for themselves to ban it themselves. In 1996, there were two failed attempts to bring back corporal

punishment: in the California General Assembly, a bill was defeated by 49 votes to 19; in the Jackson school district, Mississippi's largest, the board's vote was 3-2 against. In the state of Ohio, where corporal punishment is authorized, only 40 out of 612 school districts allow it, and even in those districts, the number of instances of corporal punishment continues to fall. Catholic schools, traditionally great believers in spanking, have pretty much eliminated it. In 1994, 469 delegates from the National Association of Elementary School Principals convened in Orlando, Florida voted unanimously to oppose corporal punishment, reckoning that it could increase violence in an already violent society. In the ten years between 1982 and 1992, the incidence of corporal punishment in public schools has gone from 1,415,540 to 555,531. In January 1999, a proposal to make Oakland a no-spanking zone was debated by the city council. Although the measure did not pass, the discussion was lively. Jordan Riak, a tireless soldier in the fight against corporal punishment, wrote on July 1st, 2000, that if a cure for cancer were discovered in Europe, every American would know about it the same evening and would immediately demand to have access to it. Why, then, do they stubbornly and tragically refuse the non-violent raising of children, which is a surefire remedy to the cancer of violence? Statistics compiled by a university research team studying American prisons found that 85% of jailed violent offenders were hit as children by those raising them. According to another U.S. federal study, commissioned following a series of school shootings, statistics show that states where physical punishment is regularly applied also have the highest rates of violence. It also bears mentioning that in the U.S., a type of abuse seems to have found its way into the practice of medicine. It involves controlling children through the use of medication--namely, Ritalin. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reveals that American children aged 2-3, restless as they normally are at that age, are being diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) and treated accordingly: the number of children between age 2-4 who were treated with Ritalin tripled between 1991 and 1995, which does not seem to correspond to any rise in the number of cases of ADHD (Allaiter Aujourd'hui, issue no. 43).

Oceania

While Oceania may seem like paradise to tourists, it hardly seems that way to its children. Corporal punishment is practiced by families everywhere and banned nowhere. In Vanuatu, but in the other nations as well, "traditional societal attitudes continue to encourage the use of such punishment within the family, in schools, care and juvenile justice systems and generally in society." On the Fiji islands, "corporal punishment had always been a common practice in schools." In New Caledonia, the traditional instrument for hitting children is a dried stingray's tail. In Australia, corporal punishment is authorized in the home, at schools, and in institutions. There have been some efforts to ban it (five over ten years), but for the time being, the best hope seems to be for banning implements such as canes, belts, or other objects, with bare-hands punishment still allowed. In New Zealand, parents can resort to "reasonable force." The Labour government in 1990 tried to make corporal punishment illegal. But they failed, and the current government has yet to reach a consensus. They have settled for establishing "Smack Free Week." In December 1999, the Children's Commissioner called for a total ban on corporal punishment in the home as well as in school. The Christian party saw this as an attack on discipline. But adults aged 18-30 are becoming receptive to the idea.

Appendix I

Introduction to the EMIDA Family Education Program (Élimination de la Maltraitance Infantile Domestique en Afrique [Eliminate Domestic Child Abuse in Africa]) Working to Make the Family a Place of Safety and Flourishing [2002] The EMIDA program was born out of the realization that in Africa, the typical upbringing of children relies mainly on beatings, disciplinary violence which families use on their children as a means of forcing them to behave in the manner desired by parents. Numerous studies conducted in the West demonstrate the harmful effects of disciplinary violence on the development and structuring of who the child is as a person and who he will grow up to be. The child becomes submissive, passive, without self-confidence; he feels guilty. He fails to assume responsibility, lacks initiative, engages in double-talk, becomes more self-centered and finds it hard to be considerate of others. The society, thereofore, is not sufficiently dynamic nor very creative. Submission, passivity, and violence reign, thus promoting tribal warfare. Irresponsibility and selfishness lead to corruption. Submission and irresponsibility do not allow for true democracy. It is this plague, so detrimental to African society's development and potential to thrive, that our organization seeks to remedy through the EMIDA program. Notwithstanding the shock we all feel any time we see or learn of violent acts against children, the EMIDA program seeks to take action with an exclusive focus on "typical" disciplinary violence in the family - typical because it is the only mode of discipline known here - and as a corollary, on disciplinary violence at school. We find these selfimposed limits to be easily justified, convinced as we are that "Every act of physical violence against any human being originates first and foremost from disciplinary violence in the family, violence which the adult had instilled in him during childhood." . . . EMIDA's goal is to expand its outreach to all the black nations of Africa as quickly as possible. By extrapolation, this would mean 218 million children who are now affected by this violence. That's huge! ... Our program consists mainly of offering to youth, young parents and young couples a new model for parent-child relationships based on expressions of love, on dialogue, and on mutual respect. In practical terms, this will involve training young psychologists or sociologists so that they have the fullest possible understanding of this new relationship, allowing them to discover the great interpersonal rewards that it will bring and even to adopt a new standard in their own lives. They will be EMIDA's instructors.

These instructors will be sent in pairs to train young coordinators who are already in charge of church youth groups, student associations, and groups of young people in general. Once trained, these coordinators, with the support of their Trainers, will train young people of their villages and neighborhoods, not only training them but also providing long-term follow-up. In terms of implementation, the budget for the EMIDA Family Education Program is based on selfcontained modules of variable size, and therefore of variable cost. An entity which plans to fund such a module will know from the start that their module will provide for, say, 20 instructors, 200, coordinators, and 3,000 young future parents, each module having autonomy and sufficient funds to cover all steps involved in that module's implementation. The EMIDA Family Education Program is, it seems to us, a completely new endeavor. In all likelihood, this will be the first time that a voluntary transformation of the parent-child relationship is set into motion on a continental scale, with the simple aim of helping individuals and society to flourish. As of year's end for 2002, EMIDA has trained a little more than 5,000 current and future parents in five provinces of Cameroon. EMIDA has been approached by the ENAAS [National School of Social Work] to provide regular education classes as well as to conduct a training seminar for all graduating students. A considerable number of Cameroonian institutions (such as the army, the sultan of the Foumban region, UNAIDS, the Institute of International Research, and the media) are now making appeals to EMIDA. Contacts in Togo, Haiti, and Chad plan to set up EMIDA training facilities as soon as some modest financial resources come their way. EMIDA, pour l'Education dans la Famille Quartier Bastos Nylon, BP 14197 Yaoundé, Cameroon Telephone/fax: ( 237 ) 22 21 35 83 Mobile: ( 237 ) 99 98 06 39 Email: [email protected] Website: emida-cameroun.org [contact and website information updated 2009] Crédit Suisse Lausanne: EMIDA account: 185953-70-1) Standard Chartered Bank Yaoundé: 01001-20789-00

Appendix II

Why the Church must denounce ordinary disciplinary violence. Some will find the appeal presented below to be outrageous if not absurd, but it is, on the contrary, a matter of basic principle. The fact that the Church has made no pronouncement on this subject can only be explained by the blindness which disciplinary violence itself produces. In this sense, the Church is no more blameworthy than all the other human institutions which have been equally blind. But its failure to realize that many of Jesus' words and deeds should impel them to denounce disciplinary violence has had consequences that show how essential respect for children is. The inevitable psychological effect of allowing children to be disrespected and of taking part in the violence committed against them is a veritable blindness toward fundamental realities concerning the early stages and very foundation of every human's existence. And it is clear that 2,000 years of tireless prayer throughout the world will not make things right. The Gospels had warned us of this: "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." Now, if one believes that the words and deeds of Jesus reflect his Father's will, this includes an absolute respect for children. By accepting violence against children, and by doing nothing to bring an end to such violence or even participating in it, the Church is doomed to powerlessness in the face of violence which this method of discipline unleashes among adults raised in this manner. The most recent, tragic, and clear example to emerge is the genocide in Rwanda that was perpetrated by Christians in the most Christianized nation in Africa. At present, disciplinary violence is particularly intense in this land and strikes children from the earliest weeks of life under premature demands of cleanliness, due to the practice of mothers carrying babies upon their backs. On the face of it, it seems laughable to see in this mode of discipline one of the genocide's causes. But if this is how we feel, it is because we forget that the parent-child relationship is what establishes the blueprint for behavior, violent or peaceful, by the adult the child will become. And in a society where all children are brought up with violence, it should come as no surprise that the adults they become can get carried away, under the right circumstances, to extreme levels of violence. Here are some points which Church authorities are strongly encouraged to consider and which hopefully Christians can bring to their attention: • Today we know beyond the shadow of a doubt the destructive effects of using disciplinary violence on children at an age when the brain is at an essential formative stage (physical and mental illnesses, accidents, suicidal tendencies, masochism, aggressiveness, delinquency, crime, political violence). In the past, we did not know of these effects, but we no longer have the excuse of ignorance. We also know that disciplinary violence constantly fuels child abuse, that subset of violence against children which is generally condemned. • Given its current and welcome insistence on the importance of human rights, should the Church not also join the newly-forming movement towards respect for children's rights (Convention on

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the Rights of the Child, Article 19 of which requires countries to take all steps necessary to protect children from all forms of violence; the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child; the decision of twelve countries, including ten in Europe, to completely ban corporal punishment)? The Church is a voice likely to be heard on a continent like Africa, where 90% of children are subjected to beatings both at home and at school, the consequences of which are incalculable for this continent in terms of domestic violence and the massacres committed there. The need to find every possible means of bringing violence to end is becoming more and more pressing. The end of the Cold War has, in a way, given free rein to the possibility of merciless clashes that before were kept relatively in check by the great powers. The violence unleashed no longer depends on interests that, while selfish, maintained a certain rationality. Increasingly, the vacuum is being filled by individual and ethnic violence, which itself is fueled in large part by the violent disciplinary traditions found in all the regions where these conflicts unfold. There are close to a dozen quotations and acts of Jesus that are totally incompatible with the acceptance of disciplinary violence. Recent discoveries concerning the results of this violence would seem to affirm those words. 1. Whenever someone wishes to drive children away from him or criticizes what children are doing, he calls them forth, embraces them, takes them in him arms, lays his hands upon then, and blesses them: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me." Here he goes straight against the repudiation of children expressed by adults. 2. Children have, in his eyes, a special communication with God: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise." Here he is quoting a psalm, but the choice of verse is significant. 3. To lead a child into sin is one of the most irreparable crimes, deserving of a death sentence. "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea" (Luke 17:2). We now know that to hit a child is to teach him violence, which he will be at greater risk of later repeating. When children are taught violence by example, especially violence against those who are weaker, are they not being led into sin? 4. Jesus sees children not as imperfect beings to be punished but as models to emulate: "For of such is the kingdom of heaven." "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." 5. Jesus commands that we not judge. And yet, all corporal punishment involves an implicit judgment. And this judgment, raining down on the child's body, concerns the person, not the act. 6. Jesus commands us not to "be wrathful against thy brother." All corporal punishment is a form of wrath. 7. Jesus commands, in the parable of the Sower, not to seek the eradication of evil. When we hit children, are we not seeking to stamp out badness in them? 8. Jesus commands to forgive as many as "seventy times seven" times. Is this the attitude of parents who hit their children?

9. Jesus commands to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us." "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Is this compatible with the act of striking a child? 10. Jesus teaches that God will judge us by how we treat the weakest among us: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Does this saying not tell us that hitting a child is in a way like hitting God himself? 11. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus gives human fathers an image made up entirely of respect for a child's freedom, of compassion, and of sincere joy at seeing him again with no trace of high-handed forgiveness, nor of punishment. On the contrary, the father receives his son and arranges a feast to celebrate the return of the one who had seemed to turn his back on him by squandering his inheritance. Three positive steps the Church could take: • May the Church plainly advise parents never to strike their children, given what we now know about the consequences of hitting, and to look for non-violent means of raising children. • May the Church remind nations of their obligations with respect to Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (signed by all but two countries) which requires that every necessary measure be taken to protect children from all assaults. • May it call upon all Christians from this day forward to rally behind efforts for the passage of corporal punishment bans in all countries and to create favorable conditions for such reform.

Appendix III

Resistance every advocate of a spanking ban can expect to face So as not to succumb to discouragement, advocates for banning disciplinary violence would do well to know the many defenses they will inevitably run into in combating the prevalent conviction that hitting is essential to raising children properly. Widespread belief throughout the world in the educational disciplinary value of spanking and of disciplinary violence in general has, in effect, been acquired from a very early age, probably starting with the first spankings received. The baby who is struck by the person whom he most loves in the world, on whom he is completely dependent, and whom he regards as the highest authority acquires the conviction that what he is suffers is perfectly normal and deserved, as well as being an excellent and unquestionable means of discipline. Rooted so deeply in the life of every one of us, intertwined with the very roots of our personality, this belief is bound to be difficult to eradicate. It is also reinforced, of course, by universal practice and generalized approval. So there is no use in getting sore at those who manifest it. Whoever undertakes to tackle this conviction and this practice must be prepared for an impressive series of defensive tactics, sometimes combined with condescending accusations.

Religious justifications There are two very ancient obstacles that we seldom come across anymore but which still find expression in some religious communities: The conviction that disciplinary violence is endorsed by God. This is still encountered among a great many Jews, Muslims, and fundamentalist Christians. It rests upon a collection of proverbs taken from the Bible and attributed to King Solomon or to the Ecclesiast. Disciplinary violence is considered to be "Biblical chastisement." As it is God's will, there is no room for argument. The conviction that God himself punishes man as earthly fathers punish their children. This conviction provides a good illustration of a vicious circle. For if we see man's suffering as the result of God's desire to punish his children, it is mainly because we ascribe to God, understood as the Father, the use of punishment similar to those which human fathers administer to their children. In this way "divine punishment" serves to justify quite human punishments, while the latter gave rise to the idea of the former.

Rationales based on personal experience or "they-say's" The rationale by experience for disciplinary violence. "When my father gave me few swift kicks in the rear, it really set me straight". This rationale boils down to saying: "As soon as I became what I am thanks to my parents' violence, that violence was a good thing." While it is good for everyone to have a sense of self-worth, it is a pity to attribute such worth to things that belittled us more than they built us up. Endlessly repeated "they-say's": "A good spanking never hurt anybody" or "never killed anyone."

More or less willful ignorance Selective amnesia. The mere memory of punishments received is so unpleasant and so humiliating that we would rather not remember them and eventually forget them completely. Most often, one does not remember blows received before the age of three. Lack of interest on the part of explorers and ethnologists. This particular form of blindness is apparent first of all from the fact that it has long been exceptional for ethnologists, most of whom are male, to take an interest in the way children were raised. Margaret Mead herself said that she looked into the child-rearing practices of New Guinea tribes only because that was the task relegated to her by her husband, Gregory Bateson. The indulgent blindness of well-meaning historians and ethnologists. When studying a past or present society for which they have an affinity, ethnologists and historians are not much inclined to talk about their negative aspects, especially if they wish to combat prejudices surrounding the people or the era that they are studying. Result: they pay no attention to the manner in which children are raised and their possible suffering. They also tend to emphasize only the positive aspects of education.

Downplaying Derision. The shame experienced from being hit continues into adulthood and causes most people to give an embarrassed smile every time they talk about what they went through. They feel worthy of ridicule for having been hit. They cannot take seriously the suffering they endured, because they still think that they deserved to be hit and that, even if they are victims, they were more to blame than those who were violent toward them. Derision is the background noise that remains long after the humiliations we suffered, much like the background noise that is present in the universe today as a vestige of the original Big Bang. Silence. Some do not speak of what they suffered. To the best of my knowledge, it was only as recently as the 19th century that a writer dared to speak of being hit by his mother and father as something

objectionable. The first ever to dare make such statements was apparently Jules Vallès. Keep in mind that practically all children since the first civilizations were hit by their parents. Children's suffering under the blows of their parents and the damage that resulted from it has for millennia been a lost continent. The corporal punishments inflicted by schoolteachers were questioned much earlier by a few philosophers for the apparent reason, mainly, that the men who served as teachers were most often slaves. Also, corporal punishment put children themselves on the level of slaves, which undoubtedly posed a problem for parents from aristocratic families. Another reason for the precedence of school disciplinary violence in being questioned could be the fact that some children whose parents were uncommonly gentle with them were shocked by what they then encountered at school. The case of St. Augustine may reflect something along these lines. He talks of complaining to his parents about the blows he received at the hands of his teachers but never mentions receiving such from his parents. On the other hand, the latter greeted his complaints with teasing, from which it could be inferred that they did not take issue with disciplinary violence and had few qualms about using it themselves. [translator's note: In-depth examination of corporal punishment's impact on St. Augustine's is found in Maurel's latest book, Oui, la nature humaine est bonne! ("Human Nature is Good!")] A more clear-cut example is found in Montaigne's account of having been raised with considerable kindness by his father. Having fully retained his sensitivity, he was horrified by the violence by his teachers at the College of Guyenne. The first Christian authors to discuss corporal punishment to recommend that it be moderated or dispensed with, to my knowledge, always spoke of school punishment, never of parental disciplinary violence. This deafening silence, which literally kept children's suffering from being heard, was blinding as well: it kept their suffering from being seen. Extreme brevity. When certain autobiographies recall corporal punishments, even if they were frequent, the authors describe them in just a few words, while having endured them all through childhood. Denial. "Nobody hits children anymore these days. Martinets are only used on dogs." (Heard inside a hardware store where I asked if martinets [A martinet is a small whip with several lashes, particular to France and designed specificially for use on children. It was possibly modeled after the "cat o' nine tails" once used on sailors] were still big sellers.) Indifference. This is among the most frequent attitudes. Denial that disciplinary violence is indeed violence. Those who believe in spanking supposedly give nothing but "swats on the diaper" or "little smacks" on the hands. Current belief in resilience. With an emphasis on resilience, the notion has been established that, all things considered, people who repeat what they suffered as children are in the minority or even quite rare. Some go so far as to call this cycle a "myth." This mistaken view results from the chorus of those who talk up resilience without distinguishing between abuse that is identified as such and routine disciplinary violence, to which they pay little attention. In cases of abuse, meaning violence in excess of

what a given society allows, there is a chance that children will meet someone who makes them understand they are being abused and who comforts them or even removes them from the parents who are brutalizing them, so these children might also realize that what they were subjected to is not normal and therefore be able to avoid doing the same. But in cases of ordinary disciplinary violence, which in some countries can be more intense than what constitutes abuse in others, the child only encounters people who tell him that such treatment serves him right and that being hit by one's parents is normal. In this case, repetition is usually what happens. Unfortunately, ill-considered statements about resilience tend to obscure this fact. Innocuous target areas. People who say, "Never on the buttocks, that's too risky from a sexual standpoint, slap them somewhere else." Or alternatively, "Never in the face, too humiliating, always on the buttocks or thighs." Psychoanalysis. Harm and pathologies do not stem from disciplinary violence, which only a few sadistic parents would inflict anyway; they stem from children's impulses, which moreover need to be controlled by laying down the law, slapping them around if necessary (ref. Christiane Olivier, Michel Pouquet, et al). Pessimistic views of children. These are the product of being hit, of course. Being hit instructs the child all at once that he is naughty, disobedient, rebellious, lazy, bratty, and bad-natured. And that all children are so, hence original sin, sadistic impulses, and fundamental violence. Idealized image of parents. We would rather remember the positive aspects of our parents' personality. So we minimize or manage to forget the blows that we received from them. Denunciations of child abuse. Lashing out at a few child-tormenters is frequently a means of diverting attention away from the ordinary disciplinary violence often practiced by the very people who decry abuse. Belief in the disciplinary value of violence is rooted in the psyche only of those who were subjected to it, however minimally, and who therefore came to be defenders of it. It is unusual for someone who has not endured violence to develop a favorable view of it. But it is also unusual for those who did not endure it to have the needed level of anti-spanking conviction to take on the role of messengers, or for their conviction to withstand the defenses they will have to face should they express it. For this reason, it is important to be familiar with these defenses. Such familiarity is important for everyone, moreover, given that these defenses control and handicap a large part of our psyches and produce blind spots in our view of reality.

Appendix IV

Declaration against "disciplinary" violence On August 7th, 1990, France signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 19 of this Convention stipulates that signatory nations "shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse." Currently in France, according to a January 1999 SOFRES survey, 80% of parents give their children face-slaps and spankings, to say nothing of whippings with a belt or martinet. Nearly everyone views this as normal, benign, and even necessary. Social services and the courts do not intervene except in extreme cases. Why is it permissible to strike a child, while it is forbidden to strike an adult man, a woman, an elderly person, or, in prison, the worst of criminals? It would seem that our laws allow assault only upon the weakest. Children have the right to be raised without violence, which is not to say without firmness. Numerous recent studies, as reported by the WHO in November 2002, have found that academic difficulties, delinquency, violence, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, various illnesses, and even accidents very often stem from the violence, moderate or otherwise, endured in childhood. Now that we know this, we no longer have the excuse of ignorance that our parents had. Is it any great surprise that some young people resort to violence when their first model of violence, by and large, was that of their own parents hitting them across the face, head, back, or buttocks? The child who is hit learns to hit others. The child who is respected learns to respect others. Is it the job of parents to teach violence or respect? Parents who hit their children to discipline them do so because they themselves were hit and do not know the effects of their blows. Only a categorical ban, like that which in France has banned hitting at school since the 19th century, can put an end to this cycle. France should follow the lead of eleven countries so far [twenty-four as of 2009], nine of them being European [nineteen as of 2009], by enacting a specific law against all mistreatment, including spanking, slaps, light smacks, etc. This law should be attended not by judicial penalties but by a broad educational outreach to parents as well as future parents concerning the effects of hitting and how to raise children without violence, just as motorists are expected to be familiar with the rules of the road.

We, the undersigned, call upon the government and its deputies to bring French law into accord with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as required by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, and to enact a specific law that will truly ban all forms of violence toward children. The text of this law might be similar to that of the Danish law: "The child has the right to care and security. He or she shall be treated with respect as an individual and may not be subjected to corporal punishment or any other degrading treatment.” [translation source: endcorporalpunishment.org] I agree with the above statement. I ask that you quickly do all in your power to reconcile our laws to the Convention on the rights of the Child. First and last name: ____________________ Address: ____________________ Signature: ____________________ Submit this statement: • to the Prime Minister (Hôtel Matignon, rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris or, by e-mail: [email protected]); • to your deputy (Assemblée Nationale, Palais Bourbon 75007 Paris); • to the newspapers you read and to groups you belong to; • to all your relatives, friends, and acquaintances (unsigned, in this case). This statement may be circulated by e-mail, or as a petition or tract, for example to distribute at school exits at dismissal time. It is launched with the support of the group Ni claques ni fessées (Tél: 01 46 38 21 22), who welcomes the involvement of associations, parties, and religious authorities. For more information, especially on the dangers of hitting and on raising children without violence, or to relate your participation in the diffusion of this statement, write to: O. Maurel, Chemin de la Cibonne 83220 Le Pradet, or at the e-mail address: [email protected] Let us treat children as we would want them to treat us.

About the Author

Olivier Maurel is a retired French teacher who has written several books on the subject of violence and non-violence. He is also president of the Observatory of Ordinary Disciplinary Violence (OVEO), which he founded in 2005. He is the father of five children and has eight grandchildren. He currently lives in Le Pradet, France. Other works by the same author: • Oui, la nature humaine est bonne! Robert Laffont, 2009 • Œdipe et Laïos: Dialogue sur l'origine de la violence (with psychoanalist Michel Pouquet) L'Harmattan, 2003 • Essais sur le mimétisme. Sept oeuvres littéraires revisitées à la lumière de la théorie de René Girard L'Harmattan, 2002 • La Non-Violence active: 100 questions-réponses pour résister et agir La Plage, 2001 • Allemagne 1631. Un confesseur de sorcières parle (translation of Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld's Cautio Criminalis) L'Harmattan, 2000 • Les Trafics d'armes de la France Maspero, 1977 • Armée ou défense civile non-violente (collective work) La Gueule ouverte, 1975 • La France trafiquant d'armes Maspero, 1973