#corporal punishment

[disciplinariansir]

caning

[conurecc]

nothing like citing bible verses while justifying child abuse

ain't no hate like christian love

curiously the majority of states that allow for corporal punishment in school (read: literal child abuse) are run by Republicans

& this remains the most accurate meme i ever made

[incognitopolls]

Psychiatric help could include medication, therapy, institutionalization, etc.

Hitting or hurting could include spanking, yanking arms or hair, etc.

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[mapsontheweb]

Laws in 16 U.S. states explicitly allow educators to use corporal punishment on students as a form of discipline.

[newyorkspanker]

Katherine's First Punishment Spanking

[penig]

It's taken me awhile to get to this (election depression), but as someone who was in the target audience at the time these books were published (though I didn't get to read it till the first American edition in 1990, when I was full grown) I feel called on to give some perspective the young'uns can't be expected to have on the corporal punishment that occurs in the story, and explain why neither my child reader nor my adult self finds anything off about the Ogre's redemption arc.

On the face of it, to a modern audience, corporal punishment and the hierarchical "thumping" that goes on seems inherently violent and abusive. And I get that. But the thing about corporal punishment and other cultural child-raising habits that seem abusive now is, that in cultures where they are practiced, they are governed by Rules. As long as the Rules are followed, no one feels abused and no abuse in fact occurs - until the Rules are broken.

You can see this operating in the story, with the arguments about who has the right and responsibility to thump whom, plus the implicit assumption that Gwinny and Sally are off-limits. It is less obvious in the context of the story, unless you were there, that the culture was in transition and some of the rules were confused and confusing, because cultural mores were changing and were also slightly different between subcultures.

The parts of the blended family in The Ogre Downstairs are at different stages of change. The Ogre, Douglas, and Malcolm come from a slightly different middle class background, one of privilege and boarding schools and a certain amount of conservatism. Sally probably never attended a boarding school; the Ogre certainly did, and it may have been an actual Public School, or one with aspirations towards that status. Sally's family is more egalitarian; the Ogre's is more hierarchical.

I'm American, and the rules in my family were not quite the same as the Rules in England - as I was aware from reading lots of English books alongside American ones - but they shared the essential Rule: Never Hit a Child in Anger. Corporal punishment has to be controlled, specific, and goal-oriented; the idea is to deal with a bad behavior in such a way that it will not be repeated. Anything else is abuse.

Parents and other authorized authority figures who delivered capital punishment hated to do it. When they said it was going to hurt them more than it would hurt you, they were speaking the exact truth. It was for that reason being fazed out all during the 20th century, with parents telling children stories about the much worse corporal punishments they were subjected to which they were sparing us. My mom used to go have to cut her own willow switch off a tree when she was punished!

British standards were always different from American ones, but they were extremely ritualistic and legalistic, judging from the literature, and complicated by public-school practices like fagging (in which younger boys were assigned as servants to older boys, who assumed responsibility for their discipline) and the way giving and taking punishment got entwined with masculine identity and status, as these podcasts note.

There's a interesting and illuminating passage in the Dorothy L. Sayers short story "Tallboys," in which an anti-caning advocate is arguing the universal horror of caning and the mother she's talking to responds: "Don't take the child, take a child. Take my child," and proceeds to explain that they have to cane the oldest child, who is perfectly capable of deciding whether something he wants to do is or is not worth the caning that will result from it, doing the crime, and then immediately confessing and taking the caning. There is a transactional element and also an element of exerting his own agency and taking responsibility for his actions, which makes caning more a rite of passage than a form of behavioral modification (as which it is clearly a failure). The second child, however, cannot be caned, and is very ashamed of not being able to take it; they've had to tell him that caning is a kind of privilege of being oldest! The youngest child is still a toddler, too young to be caned, and the mother doesn't know how they're going to resolve the matter if he's more like the older than the middle child, but that is a problem for the future.

This is all at odds with the Rules of Spanking I grew up with, but seems to have been typical of the culture of corporal punishment in British public schools and their imitators - where we can reasonably assume the Ogre grew up. These rules were being questioned and modified all around him, but the Ogre is so very bad at being a parent that his own father's example was no help and his ideas of discipline were all derived from headmasters and fag-leaders. He knows how to live in a boarding school; he has no idea how to live in the bosom of a family, and is flailing helplessly most of the time, getting increasingly desperate.

Which is why he breaks the Rules and hits Malcolm in anger. His situation is chaotic and he himself is spinning out of control. He really does abuse Malcolm in that incident, and he knew better than to do so. The rules of his side of the family are the rules of the boarding school, he had been given the information that Malcolm was a boy you couldn't cane, and he lost his temper and did it anyway.

At that point, he is poised and ready to step over the line between being a person who did an abusive act once and being an actual abuser. He defends his actions to Sally, driving her to the drastic step of leaving; he shuts himself up in his own selfish point of view and refuses to tell the kids what's going on; and only Gwinny's murder attempt shocks him out of that state. He can dismiss anything the boys tell him as being part of schoolboy jostling for position and testing his authority; but Gwinny, his own little damsel in distress that he met by rescuing her, is outside that system. She is not testing him, she has been driven to drastic action by his behavior, and it is at the point he realizes this that he wakes up and begins to solve the problem.

I read my share of problem novels in those days - most people reading problem novels were using narrative, as narrative has always been used, to expand our awareness and empathy and relieve our anxieties about the problems we or those around us might realistically have some day - and the thing about a problem that centers on the grownups, and is caused by the grownups, is that the kid can't solve it. Not in fact, and not in fiction. But the protagonist has to solve the problem, and this is particularly important in children's fiction, which fails signally if the child doesn't walk away from it empowered to some degree. So in a problem novel about something, like child abuse, which the the child can neither make go away or learn to accept and live with as part of maturation, the key is that the child can take action which leads the adults around them to accept and change the problem.

One of the key things I learned reading problem novels was that grownups have to learn and mature, too. That you can't ever stop being ready to do that.

One act of abuse does not make one An Abuser. Just as Caspar realized that he'd been bullying Malcolm, and was in danger of becoming A Bully, and makes the conscious decision to change how he handles the whole Douglass-and-Malcolm situation, the Ogre realizes that his inflexibility and self-centeredness is a much worse problem than anything the boys have done, and that Sally's leaving, and Gwinny's murder attempt, are a direct consequence of that. So he sets himself to fix the mess he's made. In essence, he changes the way he words the problem, redefining it into one that he can figure out. He's actually good at solving certain kinds of problems. He just had to get his head out of his ass to do it.

The process of bonding with the kids and changing the situation so that Sally can return home and the family become a cohesive unit is well-begun by the end of the book. There's a lot still to be done, and much of it will have to involve some negotiation of gender roles and responsibilities; Sally and Gwinny have had to do far more than their share of emotional work and nurturing and that should be addressed. It is certainly not good for them if all the Ogre does is become another growing boy in the house!

But all that's beyond the bounds of the story. We can see that a start has been made, and that's all we're entitled to. Everyone in this story is smart, and by the end of the book they are all on the same page about what they need to accomplish. They have shaped themselves into a single family and we can trust them to take it from there.

Only a bad problem novel ends with Happily Ever After. A good problem novel inhabited by realistic characters ends with "the situation has improved and the shape of things has changed in a way that will allow for things to be better going forward." Which is how real life problems resolve, after all. We have to leave room for people to get better.

This is our lone twofer episode, covering both Wilkins' Tooth and The Ogre Downstairs. Revenge, violence, & several attempted murders: hijinks ensue!

(warnings both for some technical difficulties on the audio and for more than usual the amount of discussion of child abuse)

You can find the episode transcript here, and if you're reading along, next week will be Dogsbody!

[lilithism1848]

[audhdnight]

Spanking is to parenting what prisons are to criminal justice. Allow me to elaborate:

What does spanking do? “It teaches kids to behave!” Actually, no. It teaches kids to fear their caregiver(s). But say we go with that line. How does spanking teach kids to behave? “It shows them the consequences of bad actions!” Actually, no. It shows kids that when the caregiver is displeased, the kid gets hurt. In the mind of the child, the sequence of events is not [misbehave:consequence]. It is [caregiver unhappy:pain]. And maybe you’ll say “But my kid stopped mouthing off after I started spanking them for it”. Okay, sure. Maybe they stopped responding when you argue, but only because the learned to fear what their response would bring. They’re not holding their tongue because they realized it’s disrespectful or rude or whatever else you believe it is. They’re holding their tongue because they know it won’t do any good and will only make the situation worse for them. I can guarantee they are still thinking all those rebellious naughty talk-backy thoughts. They just aren’t saying them out loud. Spanking did not teach your child to behave, it taught them to walk on eggshells.

Similarly, prisons do absolutely nothing to enforce laws. Prisons do nothing to fix the real crimes that do get committed. A shooter or rapist or embezzler being incarcerated does not bring their victim back to life, un-traumatize them, or make reparations for any damages. Additionally, it makes life a living hell for the innocent people who end up in jail (OF WHICH THERE ARE A HELL OF A LOT). And maybe you might say that the point of prison is to encourage good behavior, because no one wants to go to jail. I would ask, then, why there are so many prisons, of which so many are full or overcrowded. Clearly, the threat of incarceration is not keeping people out of jail. Additionally, much like a child who was spanked being afraid to do normal things in their own home for fear of displeasing their caregiver, regular non-criminal people are afraid of prison, even though they have done nothing wrong. They know they could be incarcerated because of falsified evidence, biased testimonies, unfair trial, or simply bigotry. Especially people of color. Even though they haven’t done anything wrong, they are scared of what could happen to them if the person in power (police) was unhappy with them.

Negative consequences unrelated to the actual incident do not discourage “bad behavior”. Just like a child who is spanked will simply learn to be sneakier, a thief who goes to jail will simply cover their tracks better next time.

Stop spanking your kids, and abolish prisons. Have a nice day.

[deniedbetahusband4]

[the-heaminator]

It would be greatly appreciated if you tools me the culture you're from and the age they started/stopped doing it to you.

[newyorkspanker]

Ribbon12 is Spanked for Lying Part 1

It was hot downstairs, so Tiler volunteered to get a fan that she claimed she saw upstairs. While I was waiting downstairs for her I noticed she was taking a long time to come back down. So in the end I found out that she was using that time as an opportunity to hide my implements and there was not any fan in the house. So I punished her for lying to me. In part 1 I use my hand only.

[lowcountry-gothic]

Evidence has shown spanking to be connected to how we relate to success and failure even in adulthood. One study found that kids that were spanked in childhood, by adolescence showed an increased reaction in the brain when errors were made. The same study found that in these same adolescents who were spanked in childhood, their brains didn’t respond as strongly to success. This means that you’re more upset when you make an error, making it harder to deal with failure, or simply making a mistake — but when you do it correctly, you don’t get the same good feelings that others do.  We commonly see these outcomes in people with Complex PTSD, including chronic hopelessness (‘I’m always going to mess things up’), shame ('there’s something wrong with me,’) as well as difficulty appreciating when you are successful and life is going smoothly. The study seems to indicate that due to spanking, the brain becomes preoccupied on making mistakes at the expense of appreciating when things go well. It would make sense that this could create some patterns of thinking that focus on what goes wrong, but difficulty focusing on what goes well — setting people up for mental health challenges.

D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield, STRONGWILLED, Chapter 10: “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child”

[annaspankinglarson]

Somewhere in India !!

She is waiting for justice to be served!

[newyorkspanker]

MemeTeam Punished for Misbehaving in Public

I took Guinevere out to a diner along with Tiler, right after their last spanking. Guin thought it would be funny to blow a straw wrapper at me while my order was being taken. Then after the meal, when we were walking to my car she was trying to get in without me unlocking in, so I told her to wait, but her brattiness moved her to pull my car handle harder. So this is was the consequences of her actions.