Editor's Note: Jordan Riak is the Executive Director of Project NoSpank, an organization which is dedicated to the eradication of corporal punishment in our schools.
Background on Corporal Punishment
I am sure that many Americans believe as I did that corporal punishment in any form is not permitted in our schools. Is this true? What states allow corporal punishment in schools and how prevalent is it?
With the exception of those who are directly effected, most people are unaware that in 23 states teachers and school administrators have the legal right to physically batter pupils. Children are sent home with bruised buttocks daily in untold numbers. According to the Office for Civil Rights l997 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Compliance Report covering the school year '96-'97, the total number of incidents reported in Mississippi, the state with the highest rate, was 60,435 or 12.4% of the total enrollment. In Texas, which has the highest number of children beaten, 118,701 children received the paddle during that year. The numbers for those states dropped to 49,859 and 81,373 respectively for the school year '97-'98. The downward trend in the number of paddlings annually is encouraging, but small comfort to victims. Current estimates range from 1/3 million to over 1/2 million incidents per year. But the true numbers are surely higher than the records show. Since the data is supplied voluntarily, and since those reporting aren't especially proud of what they are admitting to, underreporting is inevitable. Some schools decline to participate in the Office for Civil Rights' survey.
When I inform people of the extensive use of corporal punishment in the schools, they almost invariably react with astonishment. Those who remember the paddle from their own school days tend to assume (erroneously) that its use had long since faded into history. Those who are fortunate enough to have attended schools where corporal punishment wasn't used or who lived in the states where bans were in effect are incredulous when presented with information about its current use. The following anecdote is illustrative. I was invited to address a class of students at San Francisco State University who were preparing to become school counselors. Some in the group already had teaching experience. At the conclusion of my presentation, one of the students--a teacher--opined that surely I was misinformed about the situation in California. "Corporal punishment just isn't allowed here and hasn't been for years," she flatly insisted. I knew otherwise. I asked her where she had attended school and in which districts she had worked. As I expected, the places she named all had district-wide policies against the use of corporal punishment. She was unaware that in neighboring communities students were being paddled legally. Paddlers don't advertise, and one can't blame her for not knowing. The use of corporal punishment by public school teachers in California became illegal on January 1, 1987.
In the United States, there is a long-standing gentleman's agreement between government, the media, and the educational establishment to avoid any mention of teacher violence . Typical of such taboos, adherents not only refrain from entering forbidden territory but come to believe that no such territory exists. An indignant correspondent wrote me the following: "In my twenty years as a teacher in Texas, I never saw one student paddled." Strictly speaking, he might have been telling the truth about what he hadn't seen, but it's hard to believe he was unaware of what was going on all around him. Recently I heard this on the radio. An author who had written about sports heroes' influence as role models on youth was just concluding an interview and was beginning to field listener's calls. One caller recounted his experience at high school where a coach routinely beat up players. He told how one student who had been victimized by the coach later encountered him in public and punched him. The show's host abruptly cut off the call, and said laughingly, "Well, there you have the darker side. Sounds like a movie by____" and hastened to the next caller.
Rest assured, the United States does not have a monopoly on denial in this regard. At a conference on child abuse in Sydney in 1978, when I raised a question from the floor about why none of the presenters had talked about caning in schools, the moderator replied, "It seems the things you want to talk about, Mr. Riak, are not the things we want to talk about." At that same conference, where I had set up a table to distribute anti-corporal punishment literature, a member of the New South Wales education department told me this: "The corporal punishment controversy that you've been stirring up here is causing more broken friendships in the department than any other issue I can remember." Caning is no longer legal in Australian schools, and hopefully old friendships have mended.
