Is it time to ban corporal punishment of children?
Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: Although there have been marked fluctuations in thelong-term trend, the rates of almost all types of in-terpersonal physical violence have decreased since the late middle ages.1 In medieval England the homicide rate was “ … roughly twenty times those of modern Britain and up to double those … in the contemporary United States.”2 By the 1870s in the United States, judges no longer recognized the common-law right of husbands to use corporal punishment on wives. Even though wife beat-ing remains a problem, the rate has continued to decline, along with the rate of physical abuse of children by their parents3,4 and homicides of wives by their husbands.5 An important exception to ending legal violence by citi-zens is spanking and other corporal punishment by parents, such as slapping a child’s hand. In Canada and the United States corporal punishment of children by their parents is exempt from prosecution under the criminal code. The re-
Source: Europe PMC (PubMed Central)
Author: M A Straus
Language: English
Topic: Child Abuse and Trauma
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2106801776