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Originally Posted by EventHorizon
when was the last time you saw an adult in an all out fight with a kid? its not assault, its controlled (most of the time anyways) violence for the sake of discipline
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Corporal punishment (CP) is not automatically abuse. Failing to distinguish between corporal punishment (the use of pain, without inflicting injury, as negative reinforcement) and abuse is not only does no justice to CP, it significantly degrades the suffering of those who are genuinely being abused.
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So if spankings didn't work could I, in a controlled manner, use a taser on them to cause more effective pain? What about forcing them to eat a habanero? Why is that abuse but physically striking them isn't? Is it because there's some arbitrary amount of pain and suffering where it becomes abuse? Who gets to decide that? Degrading the suffering of those who ARE being abused by insisting it "doesn't count" is what significantly degrades the suffering of those who are genuinely being abused.
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And no, I don't say that out of some Stockholm Syndrome either....
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Yes I'm sure you "deserved it" because you "made them do it"...
Children are extremely perceptive. They can tell the difference between getting their attention with swatting their hand away from something that's genuinely about to harm them and genuine physical violence, no matter how supposedly calculated it is. And therein lay the problem: Hitting them doesn't teach them what they did is wrong, or what they SHOULD have done instead, it just teaches them that it's perfectly alright for bigger people to use violence on smaller or weaker people when they're angry with them.
It doesn't just hurt the kids though, violence is like heroin. It doesn't matter how "clinical" you are about it, how supposedly detached or unemotional you claim to be, it changes you inside a little bit every time. Listen to a parent very quickly get angry when confronted about that sometime, they all say the same things: They can stop anytime they want, they're perfectly in control, it's not REALLY hurting anyone, its the kids fault for "making" them do it, and it's none of your business. Just like any addict waiting for their next hit, and just like any addict they will build up a tolerance over time.
Anytime this subject comes up there's one personal anecdote that I've always found very effective on anyone who has not come into the argument already utterly unwilling to change their mind: My mother was raised in an old fashioned religious family in Israel. Her father believed, like a lot of people on the internet do, that corporal punishment isn't abuse. Well, she disagreed, and one day when she grew up she came home and paid him back for a lifetime of violence all at once by literally beating him to within an inch of his life. Nobody did a thing to stop her. After all if it's not abuse then it can't be illegal to do it back to the parent when you're strong enough, if it's illegal to do it to the parent then logically it must be FAR worse to do to a minor who is supposed to have greater protections than an adult.
There are plenty of examples out there of people who do just fine controlling entire roomfulls of what are supposedly the worst kids in an entire county without even raising their voice sometimes. I don't buy it that violence is necessarily, if the kid is that messed up then it should be readily proveable to any doctor and you need an outside solution, otherwise it's simply a failure of parenting.