Among the many acts of violence, great and small, that we commit regularly against each other and against animals, I wonder if we'll ever dispense with one of the most common: hitting children.
We call this "spanking," but the term is used to describe a variety of practices that range from a mild open-handed pat on the bottom to a vigorous session with a coathanger. At some point spanking shades over into abuse, but the precise point is too indistinct for many parents. If there are responsible ways to spank, many parents, in their anger, are incapable of practicing them.
All spanking shares several characteristics: it always involves the expression of authority of one person over another, it always inflicts pain, and the vast majority of the time it is administered in anger, or at least frustration. Essentially, it's always one person hitting another. Our culture has slowly moved in the right direction on corporal punishment. Unfortunately, plenty of American women are still beaten by their husbands, often with the same hallmarks that characterize spanking: authority, pain, anger.
But we take a much sterner view of wife beating these days. Hit your wife and you could be arrested; you're much freer to hit your child. Schools used to be a place where a child regularly ran the risk of being hit by an adult. According to the Center for Effective Discipline, 20 states - nearly all in the South, Southwest, and Midwest - still permit corporal punishment in schools, but the trend is in the right direction.
And we no longer permit beating or caning of criminals, a method of punishment still practiced in some countries. In fact, the only members of our society who can be hit with impunity, outside of a boxing ring or hockey rink, are children - the citizens with the least capacity to defend themselves. And we appear to be a nation of committed spankers. Occasionally this subject comes up among my students: anecdotally, most of them grew up being spanked and, by god, they mean to spank their own children.
