Durrant – physical punishment is abuse

But what we know from 30 years of research is that what we now call child abuse, which is people who are identified and, you know, either charged of have their cases/reports substantiated, that those people, really, are just trying to teach their children a lesson. That they aren’t usually cruel or crazy or anything different from the rest of us; that they are people who believe that by striking their children they would teach them something that they thought they needed to know. And that in retrospect they may still even justify it, that  what would you have done? What else would a person have done in that situation?’   

And really, what we’ve learned is that if we target physical punishment, that mild spanking—that word spanking is even interesting—but if we target that we can prevent so much of more severe kinds of acts. That we can’t sort of carve out this zone of aggression, parent to child aggression and say ‘this is okay. This is healthy aggression’. Or ‘this is non-violence. It’s just not reality. It’s a way that we have of justifying our own actions to ourselves, but it’s not reality. The reality is that physical punishment has immediate potential to escalate and that it is, that it reflects a difficulty that the parent is having in finding a constructive solution and it indicates that that parent needs support. So we shouldn’t just be accepting it and justifying it, rather, we should be targeting it and doing everything we can to help parents find positive ways of guiding their children.