Durrant – punishment and the law

I think that what makes physical punishment in particular so interesting is that it has been identified time and time and time again as a risk factor in children’s development. It’s not an enhancer or optimizer. It’s a risk factor. With other risk factors we tend to move quickly to try to change that. So when we find out, for example, that a certain food is likely to cause cancer, we move very quickly to change that. When we look at other risk factors in child development as well, we’ve made tremendous strides in education and in all kinds of aspects of child development. But with physical punishment, there’s this extra layer on it that is, well, I would call it culture, not in the sense of ethnicity but in the sense of societal values and belief systems. So for example, physical punishment is the only risk factor in a child’s life that is legal and justified in law. There is no other risk factor that I’m aware of that we have created a law to ensure that we can maintain that risk factor in children’s lives.  

So it’s very interesting in that way that we have this entrenched sort of set of beliefs around physical punishment. I think that most of us would say children need nurturance, children need support, they need a positive environment, they need empathy and understanding and they need guidance and so on. But it’s surprising that so many of us would say: ‘and they need to be hit’. It’s very mysterious why this is. I think it has a lot to do with history. It has to do a lot with, actually, histories like colonization where methods of physical punishment have been introduced into cultures as a means of obtaining obedience and submission and it really is an outgrowth of that. So we’ve been able to hit people through the centuries in situations where there was a power hierarchy. The only one that still remains is the law around hitting children. And that is a very interesting cultural phenomenon.  

That’s not the case in many other countries around the world. In fact in more that 100 countries around the world it’s now against the law to hit children in schools. In Canada, that’s not so clear at the moment actually because our law says school teachers can use corrective force but the Supreme Court interpreted that to not include corporal punishment. So that’s a bit confusing. In 19 countries it’s now prohibited