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Most caregivers regard it as their responsibility to teach children to behave appropriately. What is appropriate behaviour and how to make children behave as they should varies according to the local context. In Tanzania, although a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, corporal punishment is lawful in schools, in the penal system, in families, and in alternative care institutions. In a previous chapter, caregivers' conceptions of corporal punishment have been explored. This chapter takes point of departure in these findings and takes them a step further by investigating how they can be understood in the light of the caregiving relationship using the concepts zone of intimacy and ethics of care.

Shenoute's goal for the monastery, including the female community, was to create one monastic experience for all monks “whether male or female.” His emphasis on uniformity was meant to preclude difference, especially gender difference, even as his language continually reinscribed the categories of “male” and “female.” Three areas – corporal punishment, fasting, and teaching – show evidence of change within the female community as a result of Shenoute's insistence on uniform monastic practices. Yet, Shenoute also, perhaps unwittingly, created an asymmetrical monastic hierarchy where all monks were subordinate to Shenoute, but the female monks were also under the authority of male envoys (with the same monastic rank as the female leaders) who served as proxies for Shenoute. Gender also served as a structural basis of the community: both a physical boundary, evident in the women's seclusion and the prohibition on visits between male and female monks, including relatives, and a cultural boundary, reinforced by Shenoute's alignment of the women with susceptibility to the Devil, separated, and so created difference between the male and female communities.

The parental discipline privilege is a robust exception to the modern rule that punishes all violence, including intrafamilial violence. Every state allows parents to physically punish their children, often going well beyond ‘spanking’ to include hair-pulling, beatings with belts or sticks, even choking. The privilege is the only remaining status exception to criminal assault and battery; other once-permissible violence, such as abuse of wives and apprentices, has long been criminalized. Yet despite its anachronistic nature, parental corporal punishment remains surprisingly understudied. Accordingly, it is an important topic for inclusion in this volume on the Politicization of Safety. Experts unanimously agree that even mild corporal punishment carries significant developmental consequences. It can evolve into serious child abuse, and renders its victims more likely to hit their partners and children as adults, perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Particularly troubling is that corporal punishment plays out in highly gendered, racialized, and heteronormative ways. I argue that the underlying mens rea of the parental discipline privilege exception to assault both perpetuates this violence and warps the criminal law’s standard approach to punishment, which ordinarily matches culpability with control. In contrast, the parental privilege forgives purposeful beatings “intended to benefit a child.” After analyzing the implications of this paradox, this Chapter concludes by advocating the privilege’s abolition.

This chapter investigates the physical and sexual violence to which children were subjected in twentieth-century Ireland. The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC), in spite of its founding mission to protect children from ‘cruelty,’ rarely dealt with explicit cases of cruelty, abuse, or assault in the course of their daily rounds. The use of corporal punishment in national schools is then discussed. Children were subject to a significant degree of sexual violence in twentieth-century Ireland. Sentencing and conviction patterns show that sexual crimes against children were not treated as serious, and no one recognized the potentially harmful long-term effects of sexual abuse on children. Irish society at all levels tolerated a degree of violence against children that was striking in its regularity and routineness.

The goal of this book is to stimulate further research by psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists concerned with child development and parent behavior. Given the recent and growing concern with corporal punishment, the book appears at an opportune moment, when it might be the catalyst for more systematic and coherent research. Chapters define corporal punishment from the perspective of a particular theory, identify those aspects of corporal punishment that the theory is most adequate to explain, and relate the theory at hand to other theories. Many of the chapters also review empirical research on corporal punishment informed by the given theories, explore methodological issues, and suggest avenues for further research.

This chapter briefly assesses the geographical scope of the practice of corporal punishment and investigates reports of the rare occasions upon which it has been considered by the General Assembly and other UN bodies. It compares the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions' prohibition of corporal punishment and takes on the question whether the infliction of corporal punishment would entail a grave breach of the Conventions within their respective meaning. In the environment of international human rights law, the chapter studies the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners definition of corporate punishment. Furthermore, it analyses the Tyrer v. United Kingdom case brought before the European Commission of Human Rights to test the compatibility of jurisdiction under the European Convention on Human Rights.

This chapter explores the Campbell and Cosans case involving Jane Cosans, mother of the fifteen-year-old Jeffrey Cosans, and Grace Campbell, mother of the six-year-old Gordon Campbell. Both women protested the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure in their children's schools. The mothers lodged the case before the European Commission for Human Rights (ECHR), claiming that corporal punishment was both degrading and inhumane, and thus a violation of Article 3 of ECHR's Protocol 1. As a defence, the state schools, through the UK government, argued that the Scotland's domestic law and the 1968 Code of Practice provided adequate safeguards against such punishment. The ECHR rejected the claim of the mothers. The mothers then appealed the case before the European Court of Human Rights, yet it was subsequently dismissed.

This chapter addresses two major issues. First, it reviews several theoretical accounts of the development of aggression in children. While some theories suggest that aggressive behavior is learned, others suggest that it is innate, and that children must be socialized to be nonviolent. Second, family of origin parameters are thought to be important in the process of socialization, in particular for the development of self-control. Using data from Canada's National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), it investigates the direct and indirect effects of a variety of family factors on childhood aggression. In particular, the chapter finds that corporal punishment and yelling are strongly associated with both aggression and property offences. The nuances of relationships among family factors such as income and parent education, parenting factors such as corporal punishment, yelling, consistency and supervision, and aggressive outcomes are explored in detail.

This chapter discusses a number of issues surrounding the most widely implemented school disciplinary practices in U.S. public schools today out-of-school suspension and expulsion. It discusses the current prevalence of suspensions, the effectiveness of suspensions, and health and social problems that have been shown to be associated with suspensions. It also examines what is known about the reasons why students are suspended from school and raises a number of questions and concerns about the way in which certain categories of offenses are defined and reported. It discusses issues surrounding the disproportionate rates of suspensions for African-American and Hispanic students and concludes with a brief discussion of the prevalence and outcomes associated with the use of corporal punishment in those states where it remains legal.

This chapter examines how ideas about race and order shaped the way the courts’ articulated students’ rights in relation to school discipline in the 1970s and early 1980s, placed in context of the rise of mass incarceration. The chapter begins by discussing how advocates for students of color confronted racial disparities in school discipline and the ways that the courts limited the kinds of claims students could make about racial discrimination in suspensions and expulsions.In Ingraham v. Wright, the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit school officials from using corporal punishment. In New Jersey v. T.L.O., the Court determined that students’ do have a limited right to privacy in relation to searches of their clothing and belongings at school. This chapter places these cases within the context of a longer history of a punitive turn in education and demonstrates how these rulings reinforced existing racial inequities in school discipline.

There is no magic wand to wave over child abuse; no quick fix to this tragic reality. Yet, progress is possible, and this chapter describes broad structural changes that will reduce child abuse and neglect. Little progress is possible so long as poverty remains common, and the chapter grapples with this issue. A development that holds promise for reducing maltreatment is home health-visiting for babies and young children, and research on home visiting programs is described. The chapter discusses the importance of rebuilding a sense of community, and proposes the outlawing of corporal punishment. It is argued that a great deal of serious and fatal child abuse results from corporal punishment that gets out of control. Corporal punishment is unnecessary to raise healthy, obedient children, and banning corporal punishment will substantially reduce physical abuse. Thirteen nations have banned corporal punishment, and it is time for America to adopt this enlightened approach.

This chapter focuses on the poem, “Casabianca,” by Felicia Hemans, which presents the spectacle of a child sailor who is blown to pieces because his sense of duty keeps him standing on deck during the bombardment of his ship. This poem is used as a lens to examine the processes whereby the performance of poetry in Britain's elementary schools forged short-term and long-term bodily relationships between individuals and measured language. Looking, among other things, at the history of corporal punishment within mass education, the chapter considers not only what happened to children, but also to poems with regular rhythms, during the process of enforced recitation. The fragmented survival of “Casabianca” in popular consciousness today, this chapter argues, is the last remaining trace of its pedagogical past, of a time when poetry was experienced in and through the body.

Lays out the narratives and explores the issues of various periods of crisis that prompted Shenoute's letters to the female monks. The issue themselves are wide ranging: Shenoute's exercise of power over the female community; his insistence on the gender separation of the male and female monks, including forbidding visits among relatives even as Shenoute himself visited the female community; incidents of female homoeroticism; a debate over what constituted proper monastic duties and proper corporal punishment; gossip; disputes over the quality of clothing the women were producing for male monks, including Shenoute's; and complaints about the excessive nature of Shenoute's leadership. All these topics, even in their diversity and their focus on conflict, provided Shenoute with the opportunity to teach all the monks, male and female, how to lead a salvific life in the monastery.

This chapter examines religious freedom issues that concern the family and parents. There can be no doubt that religiously devout parents are vitally interested in the successful transmission of their faith to their offspring. This is one of the prime incidents of religious liberty. The current law governing family autonomy and the religious upbringing of children is outlined, and liberal and religious conceptions of the family and childrearing are compared. The chapter looks at three controversial topics: whether a maturing child has an independent right of religious liberty, the scope of religious childrearing in the fractured family, and whether devout parents have any special religious claim to administer corporal punishment to their children amidst the growing international call for the abolition of the parental right of reasonable chastisement.

Biological kin, who were defined with precise language as “those according to the flesh,” lived in the monastery alongside those monks who had renounced their families to join the monastery. These monks faced particular challenges since they experienced enforced gender separation from spouses and relatives, witnessed the corporal punishment of relatives, and even saw relatives expelled from the monastery. Overall, the monks with kin were expected to live as though they had also renounced each other so that all monks had the same “kinship” with each other and so shared the same salvation. Despite these expectations, Shenoute found a way to have male and female monks visit each other without violating his own commands: male relatives often served as envoys carrying these very letters from Shenoute to the female community. Finally, the experiences of one female monk, Tachom, shows the intersection of the three patterns that determined a monk's life: power, gender, and family.

This chapter discusses the reception of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and International Labour Convention No. 29 concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour in the case law of the Strasbourg bodies. The receptiveness of to international child rights law in the Strasbourg case law was impressive. The ECHR contains few specific references to child rights, and its general provisions needed to be adapted in order to meet the changing international standards. While Contracting States have an important margin of appreciation in family law and juvenile justice, this did not prevent the Court from referring and applying international child rights law. A different trend is apparent, however, in relation the sexual abuse and forced labour of children, where the Court relied on older or less specific international instruments.