6 December, 2007...11:56 am
Smacking debate
Dot writes: Ken and Geoff have been having an animated (read: somewhat ad hominem) debate about the New Zealand smacking ban and I want to comment. I spent ages last night writing a very detailed comment in the comments form and then the computer suddenly swallowed it and it vanished as though it had never been. As my comment is directed more at the terms of the debate than at whether, in fact, one should permit smacking, it seems worth putting it in a new post.
Why is physical punishment singled out as a) clearly different from other forms of punishment and b) inherently less permissable? I’m assuming that it is permissable and indeed necessary that parents punish their children in some way or another to teach them that bad behaviour has consequences. But what makes a mild slap inherently worse - morally worse - than, say, sending the child to his/her room for an hour? Does it actually make the child suffer more? My instinctive answer is that it doesn’t; rather less, if anything, as it’s briefer. One could even argue that smacking has a clear advantage in that it can be administered very quickly and thus connected very directly to whatever it was the child did wrong; it can be presented as an immediate consquence of naughtiness, which might be harder with a more drawn out or deferred punishment such as sending to one’s room or cancelling a treat. The argument that smacking is wrong because serious beating is wrong (the example given was beating with a plastic pipe) doesn’t hold up at all: in that case, sending a child to her/his room would be wrong because imprisoning him/her in it for a week would be wrong. If we grant that parents have any duty to punish we must recognise that this will involve assessing legitimate and illegitimate degrees of punishment. Punishment has to be uncomfortable; it must not be cruel, and physical cruelty is not the only kind. So, having dismissed the idea that smacking always hurts more, and having got rid of the slippery slope argument as applicable to any kind of punishment and not just smacking, we are left again with the question of what is so special about physical punishment.
My answer to this would be to do with the cultural meanings of violence and the body. Our culture is one that polices physical contact extremely closely and loads it with meaning. Ken and Geoff have discussed the relevance of parallels with behaviour between adults to punishment of children. In terms of one’s right to punish a child and not another adult for bad behaviour (because the state takes that right to itself), the cases are quite different, but in terms of the meaning of violence the parallel is instructive: we see a person who takes revenge by punching someone’s nose as a thug, but someone who takes revenge by, say, disseminating a private and compromising e-mail from their target, appears unscrupulous but on the whole rather clever. There is a class dimension to this: violence is seen as lower class and stupid, bloodless revenge as professional class and clever. The ability to make effective use of violence is no longer the key to social dominance (as it was back in the days when the ruling class was a warrior class) but instead is marginal to how social power is gained and manipulated.
Second, our culture has a sense that there is something sacred and bounded about one’s body and that keeping the hands of others off one’s body is essential to the integrity of the individual. This sacredness of the body is felt so deeply that the justice system imprisons people for years rather than resort to a physical punishment which would be much briefer, not to mention cheaper. This sense of sacredness is reflected also in the modern hypersensitivity to possible sexual content in almost any kind of exposure or touch. In the past, because children, while sexual, were not sexual in an adult way, and because they depended on adults for help with their bodily functions, it was felt that the bodies of children were not untouchable in the same way as those of adults; neither smacking nor public nakedness could damage their innocent dignity. These days of course children’s bodies are increasingly invested with sexual meanings and I think the discomfort with smacking is a related phenomenon.
As a third, more minor point: we are now very unused to, and very frightened of, physical pain, which we can usually eliminate or ameliorate with drugs in settings where previous generations had to grin and bear it (which isn’t to say they wouldn’t have taken the drugs like a shot; I’m not saying pain is good). So physical punishment does seem a bigger deal to us from this point of view than it used to.
None of these points are arguments for smacking, though they weaken the arguments usually advanced against it. I just want to observe that modern attitudes to the body are a historical phenomenon, resulting from the changing manifestations of state power (read Foucault), the increasing alienation of work from the body through the movement from the field to the factory and finally to the computer screen, and the growth of privacy (people used to share beds quite routinely with strangers in inns; 15th century legal cases disputing whether marriages had taken place would bring witnesses to say they’d been sharing a room with the couple while they had sex).
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