Corporal punishment

Corporal punishment is the infliction of physical pain in response to wrongdoing. Spanking of children is a typical example of corporal punishment. In a broad sense, it is also the infliction of physical pain upon a person's body as punishment for a crime or infraction.

Darrel Reid, head of Focus on the Family - Canada (an evangelical Christian group) said that "The theological underpinning for family corporal punishment is tied up with the responsibility that God gives families for raising the young. You can find it particularly in the early books of the Bible, where God says your responsibility is not just nurturing but also correcting them."

Liberals have opposed spanking of children and sometimes even threaten to take children away from parents who use this corporal punishment. In some states a foster parent cannot spank a foster child. Claiming to draw upon the latest research on brain development, Alice Miller speaks out against the increasing popularity of childhood corporal punishment and demonstrates how spanking and other disciplinary traumas are encoded in the brain, stunting our ability to overcome them. Our bodies retain memories of humiliation, causing panoply of physical ills and dangerous levels of denial. This denial, necessary for the child's survival, leads to emotional blindness and finally to mental barriers that cut off awareness and the ability to learn new ways of acting. If this cycle repeats itself, the grown child will perpetrate the same abuse on later generations, warns Miller.

In a broad sense, corporal punishments include flogging, beating, branding, mutilation, blinding, and the use of the stock and pillory.

External links

• Books by Alice Miller - The Natural Child Project
• Child corporal punishment: spanking
• Robert Ingersoll: Corporal Punishment