Not that what I think carries any legal weight, but I don’t think spanking should be a crime. This is not a judgment over the rightness or the wrongness of spanking so much as it is my opinion that whether and how parents discipline their children is one of the places where government does not belong.
OTOH, there is such a thing as child abuse, and while I cannot come up with an overarching definition of what it is, I don’t think ordinary spanking qualifies. At some point, though, a line is crossed, and common sense would suggest that it is crossed when a child is severely or permanently injured. It might be possible for that line to be crossed if a small child were brutally spanked for a long period of time, or if, say, belts, whips, canes, rods, car aerials, or electrical cords were used — especially if they caused contusions or lacerations. However, even corporal punishments using belts, whips and canes were routine not that long ago, and it is worth remembering that what might have been done to a child in the 1920s could well constitute child abuse in many states today. At-home spanking is not a crime in any state in the U.S., although it is in a number of countries.
Not being a parent, this is not an issue I had never spent much time pondering. But what piqued my sudden curiosity was a Wall Street Journal piece on legal action taken against a “Slavic Christian” immigrant family:
SALEM, Ore.–Dmitriy Kozlov waited until nightfall to place a 911 call to Oregon authorities, alerting them to a terrible case of child abuse in an immigrant community that existed, almost invisibly, in this city’s midst.
The alleged victim was 14-year-old Dmitriy himself. From a pay phone on July 20, 2009, he reported that his parents regularly beat him and several of his six siblings. Their parents, he said, struck them with wires, branches and belts for wearing makeup and getting a fake tattoo.
Police quickly arrested Oleksandr and Lyudmila Kozlov and placed the children, who ranged in age from newborn to 15 years, into foster care. The couple was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison and later stripped of most parental rights. The Kozlovs denied wrongdoing.
News of the case spread through this state capital, sparking outrage. Yet one subset of the community sprang to the Kozlovs’ defense, holding demonstrations, filling the gallery at court hearings and flooding state officials with letters.
Many of these supporters, Russian-born Christians like the Kozlovs themselves, believed the parents were disciplining their children according to Biblical law. In their view, the government was out to “destroy the family because of their faith,” says Tatyana I. Bondarchuk, a counselor who helped brief authorities about the group.
OK, what happened was either child abuse as defined under the law or it was not. I think the religious views of the parents are irrelevant. So is the interpretation of Solomon’s “spare the rod and spoil the child” saying. If it is a crime to beat a child with wires or “rods,” even those who believe in using the rod have the same legal duty to obey that law as anyone else.
And while I don’t think it should happen, if spanking ever were criminalized in this country, I think it would be a mistake to allow a religious exception. The groups that are taking up the Kozlov’s cause would do well to remember the old “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” saying, because there is no reason I can think of that granting a religious exception (for “Slavic Christians” or whatever group) for child beating would not also require granting a religious exemption to Muslims for wife beating.
Wife beating, is of course sanctioned in the Koran.
…those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance – [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand.
Doesn’t sound very grand to me. However, I can see how people who consider themselves bound by religious texts might interpret that as an order from God to beat an arrogant or disobedient wife. And while there is nothing in the Bible which authorizes (much less advises) wife beating, I see very little difference between a religious exemption for beating a child with rods as Solomon advised, and a religious exemption for beating a wife according to the Koran.
Or for that matter, a religious right to smoke pot. I realize it might be appealing to libertarians as a drug war workaround, but how far does the principle go?
Comments
12 responses to “Religious right?”
Except “spare the rod….” does not mean what most people think it means. The rod is a shepherd’s crook. You use it to pull the sheep gently back into the fold.
You beat the sheep and they run away.
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So can we cite the community for Bible abuse? I don’t think so. Still…..
Societal norms change. In the 1950’s it was common practice for public school teachers to use corporal punishment. One 2nd grade teacher used a rubber enema bag for spanking – said it didn’t leave marks like a wooden blackboard pointing stick all teachers had then and regularly used for spankings.
They also used humiliation by having children stand in a corner facing the wall. One teacher I remember had a special sign made that they would have a child hang around his neck with the word “LAZY” in bold letters on it.
Catholic schools were worse. Some nuns were into a little SM I think. The stories about rulers used on the back or palm of a child’s hand is true, if my experience is an example.
And God help you if you got sent to the priest.
Not passing judgment here, but there was order in classrooms, and in the home.
Frank,
And the kids who don’t take well to being beat? They have grudges. And take them out on the rest of us.
A 10 minute perusal of the wanted posters in the post office will give you a rather nice education.
I was spanked, but only when I deserved it.
My father and my grandmother used to make me get the implement they were going to be beat me with.
That would be psychological torture today.
My father and his rubber-soled slippers or belt (my mom was of the “Wait until your father gets home) and my grandmother (Nona, she was from Italy) would make me cut a switch.
The first time I cut one really, really small. I brought it to her thinking, “Geez, she sure is stupid.”
She went and cut one much too thick and I found out who was stupid.
One important part, for me, was that it was never incapacitating (they never drew blood or broke bones and I don’t bruise very easily so who knows if a normal person would have been bruised?) but the really important part was that I always knew I deserved it.
They didn’t let me get away with stuff when they were in a good mood or come down harder when they were in a bad mood.
Random beatings or beatings all out of proportion to the transgression are bad, but if your parents catch you running out into traffic repeatedly, maybe a beating will focus your mind before you meet Mr. Bumper traveling at 30MPH.
I also went to Catholic School from 1969 to 1981.
The nuns didn’t beat me and if anybody deserved it, it was me. I was the type who would glue all the teacher’s stuff to her desk during recess (heh).
I was flicked in the ear a few times, but I wrote “I will not do” (whatever I had done, like spitting) 100s of times a lot more.
Simon, yes of course it’s not right to beat children. OTOH, maybe the laws have gone too far making parents & teachers afraid to inflict any punishment or discipline. Is this what’s behind the epidemic of ADD & ADHD?
Child abuse is very new, only appearing in the 60s. Child sexual abuse in the 70s.
A ’91 essay by Ian Hacking on the topic is suddenly online
http://mfs.uchicago.edu/upcoming/epidemics/epireadings/hacking.pdf
Lesson: be very suspicious of “public problems.”
Another new public problem is pit bulls.
New public problems are the route to political power.
rhhardin,
Perhaps the focus was on the center of the distribution in the past – those who get abused and get over it.
And now we look at the outliers. The 10% to 20% who don’t get over it and who use drugs and/or become trouble makers.
In other words the individual has become more interesting.
All to the good.
BTW a good exercise is to go to the post office and thumb through the wanted posters. Pick out the abused kids. That would be almost all of them.
Try this in any era when photographing criminals was common.
M Simon:
I don’t understand your exercise. How does one tell how many criminals were abused by looking at their pictures?
Do you have reliable data about the degree to which criminality results from parental abuse — of course it’s a deep methodological problem what to count as abuse rather than merely too-strict parenting (not to deny the existence of some clear cases) — and how much is explained by other factors, such as cultural or genetic ones?
I don’t mean this as a hostile question, just wondering.
fhhardin,
After reading the lengthy article by Ian Hacking, I’m left with the thought that he’s a post-modern piece of crap.
Who is this guy anyway, a disciple of Foucault or Derrida?
I’m not into deviant philosophy, but like Justice Potter Stuart said about porn – “I know it when I see it” – and this article deconstructs child abuse by making it all relative. Incest indeed!
It’s one thing to enforce discipline in a home with a mild spanking, and quite another to burn a child or brake bones or have sex with them.
Simon,
After reading Hacking’s article, I take back what I may have implied above about the use of corporal punishment. Except in self-defense, it’s never right to physically harm another person, including a child.
The first spanking I remember was from my first grade teacher on my first day of school. I am certain that wasn’t the first spanking I’d received, but it stands out in my memory because it was the first one I didn’t think I’d earned.
My crime was getting up from my desk to watch through the door window older children going somewhere… I was curious. The teacher said nothing, just walked up behind me and swatted me with a wooden paddle.
It wasn’t the spanking that upset me, it was not being aware of the rules. That was traumatizing! I felt I’d been set up.
At home, I was never spanked for anything I did not know was wrong. I was certainly no angel and the worst part of any punishment I ever got was the lecture and knowledge I’d disappointed my parents. The spanking was the least painful and traumatic part of the punishment.
Though I don’t remember it, several aunts and uncles and my grandparents have told me the story of my father threatening to take the toddler me outside and spank me if I didn’t stop squirming and being a pain in church. Apparently, I asked in a rather loud voice to go outside and get spanked rather than have to sit still. No one has ever told me, but I’m betting I didn’t get spanked that day.
Since my parents never inflicted much pain during a spanking that was always my choice of punishment. I well remember the first time I was knowingly impertinent enough to tell my father to skip the lecture and get on with the beating…
How I wished for a mere lecture in the days following. Instead, I was subjected to both my mother and father being disappointed in me. Psychological abuse, it certainly was!
And then I became a parent. I learned that physical punishment was ineffective. My parents sort of knew this too, else they would not have also used lectures and their disappointment as the primary means. The spanking served as a ritual ending to the punishment.
I think I am a very lucky person to have had parents who explained not only why they were punishing me but who also explained why they though it important for me to behave a certain way.
And I hope that because I can see how my parents coped with me and my siblings and how I coped with their grandchildren… that I can guide the parents of my grandchildren.
My oldest grandchild is six years old and I’d bet he’s never been spanked… nor have the others younger than he.
But I sometimes wonder if my grandchildren have no way of immediately diminishing their guilt as quickly as a simple spanking.
Guggenbuhl-Craig (a Jungian) wrote on the recent inability to discuss child sexual abuse without being accused of being a monster in his lectures, wondering why that was.
His conclusion, being a Jungian, was that it was partial archetypes. The child is always completely innocent, and as a grammatical reflex there is created an absolute evil to go with it; and not to threaten that view is the highest priority.
He made a nice remark as well, about his therapy with children who have had abuse, was that that view does not take the child seriously as a human being. I wonder if I can find the essay…
“This therapeutic position can be harmful for the psychological development of a child. Therapists simply think of and accept the child as a victim. They energentically reject and deny any attempt on the child’s part to assume any responsibility for what happened or at least to recognize his or her own ambivalence. Therapists thereby impose a victim psychology upon the child, a psychology which says that for everything that happens there is always someone to blame. They nip in the bud the child’s growing awareness that he is at least partially responsible for much that happens to him — or at least for the back and forth tension between rejection and acceptance. This therapeutic position does not take the child seriously as a human being. It sees the child solely as a mistreated, innocent victim. The child is no longer a part of creation with all its possibilities and contradictions, with its conflicting instincts and desires.”
(Myth and Reality of Sexual Abuse of Children, in _From the Wrong Side: a paradoxical approach to psychology_ p.61)
I connect that with the modern version of childhood which extends now to age 26, where children used to be just small adults. It’s that extension that’s being defended.
Finally, my last bit of knowledge that I’ve come across on the matter, is all of Dorothy Rabinowitz’s essays in the WSJ about the various day care center prosecutions of impossible crimes, that I think won her a Pulitzer prize.
It has all the earmarks of hysteria.
The three chief modern public problems that I’ve lived long enough to see as not problems when I was a kid: vicious dogs, drunk driving and child abuse.
That’s why you need old guys around.
The world works fine the way it used to work, and that’s a data point.
The essay ad title that attracted me to the Guggenbuhl-Craig book was “The Blessings of Violence.”
As modern as today.