Sir Frank Peters :
New research from the University of Michigan says children who are given corporal punishment emerge as anti-social, defiant and aggressive people.
And the University of Texas at Austin who co-produced a study analyzing 50 years of research on corporal punishment that involved over 160,000 children, totally agrees.
The researchers said the study represents the most complete analysis to date of the outcomes associated with hitting children. It’s also yields greater specificity into the effects of spanking alone than previous papers on the subject, which included other types of physical punishment in their analyses.
The research concluded that children who are regularly hit are more likely to defy their parents, experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties.
Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, said: “We found that corporal punishment was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents’ intended outcomes when they discipline their children.”
Co-author Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that corporal punishment “was significantly linked with 13 of the 17 outcomes they examined, all in the direction of detrimental outcomes. Hitting children does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do,” he said.
Researchers identified some long-term effects among adults who were hit as children. Among the findings: The more they were hit, the more likely they were to exhibit anti-social behavior and to experience mental health issues.
“We as a society think of corporal punishment and physical abuse as distinct behaviors. Yet our research shows that corporal punishment is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree,” added Elizabeth Gershoff.
The researchers noted both spanking and physical abuse were associated with near equal measures as having the same detrimental child outcomes.
In a nutshell, corporal punishment achieves nothing good; never has, and never will, but causes incalculable damage to a child. It is evil, cruel, inhuman, wrong, and needs to be abolished in all settings.
In 2011 Justice Md Imman Ali and Md Sheikh Hasan Arif outlawed the inhuman, ineffective, ignorant practice of corporal punishment in schools and madrasas throughout Bangladesh, declaring it to be “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and a clear violation of a child’s fundamental right to life, liberty and freedom
“, but there are rogue ‘teachers’ in schools and madrasa still shamelessly performing the unlawful practice.
“We hope that our study can help educate parents and teachers about the potential harms of corporal punishment and prompt them to try positive and non-punitive forms of discipline,” Gershoff said.
(Sir Frank Peters is a former newspaper and magazine publisher and editor, an award-winning writer, royal goodwill ambassador, humanitarian and a human rights activist.)
