Corporal punishment


A corporal punishment or a physical punishment is a punishment which is intended to cause physical pain to a person. When it is inflicted on minors, especially in home and school settings, its methods may include spanking or paddling. When it is inflicted on adults, it may be inflicted on prisoners and slaves, and can involve methods such as whipping with a belt or a horsewhip.
Physical punishments for crimes or injuries, including floggings, brandings, and even mutilations, were practised in most civilizations since ancient times. They have increasingly been viewed as inhumane since the development of humanitarianism ideals after the Enlightenment, especially in the Western world. By the late 20th century, corporal punishment was eliminated from the legal systems of most developed countries.
The legality of corporal punishment in various settings differs by jurisdiction. Internationally, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw the application of human rights law to the question of corporal punishment in several contexts:
  • Corporal punishment in the home, the punishment of children by parents or other adult guardians, is legal in most of the world. As of 2023, 65 countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America, have banned the practice.
  • School corporal punishment, of students by teachers or school administrators, such as caning or paddling, has been banned in many countries, including Canada, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and all of Europe. It remains legal, if increasingly less common, in some states of the United States and in some countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
  • Judicial corporal punishment, such as whipping or caning, as part of a criminal sentence ordered by a court of law, has long disappeared from most European countries. As of 2021, it remains lawful in parts of Africa, Asia, the Anglophone Caribbean and indigenous communities in several countries of South America.
  • Prison corporal punishment or disciplinary corporal punishment, ordered by prison authorities or carried out directly by correctional officers against the inmates for misconduct in custody, has long been a common practice in penal institutions worldwide. It has officially been banned in most Western civilizations during the 20th century, but is still employed in many other countries today. Punishments such as paddling, foot whipping, or different forms of flagellation have been commonplace methods of corporal punishment within prisons. This was also common practice in the Australian penal colonies and prison camps of the Nazi regime in Germany.
  • Military corporal punishment was once common. Only a few jurisdictions still allow it.
In many Western countries, medical and human rights organizations oppose the corporal punishment of children. Campaigns against corporal punishment have aimed to bring about legal reforms to ban the use of corporal punishment against minors in homes and schools.

History

Prehistory

Author Jared Diamond writes that hunter-gatherer societies have tended to use little corporal punishment, whereas agricultural and industrial societies tend to use progressively more of it. Diamond suggests this may be because hunter-gatherers tend to have few valuable physical possessions, and misbehavior of the child would not cause harm to others' property.
Researchers who have lived among the Parakanã and Ju/'hoansi people, as well as some Aboriginal Australians, have written about the absence of the physical punishment of children in those cultures.
Wilson writes:

Antiquity

In the Western world, the corporal punishment of children has traditionally been used by adults in authority roles. Beating one's son as a form of punishment is even recommended in the book of Proverbs:
Robert McCole Wilson argues that, "Probably this attitude comes, at least in part, from the desire in the patriarchal society for the elder to maintain his authority, where that authority was the main agent for social stability. But these are the words that not only justified the use of physical punishment on children for over a thousand years in Christian communities, but also ordered it to be used. The words were accepted with but few exceptions; it is only in the last two hundred years that there has been a growing body of opinion that differed. Curiously, the gentleness of Christ towards children was usually ignored".
Corporal punishment was practised in Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome to maintain judicial and educational discipline. Disfigured Egyptian criminals were exiled to Tjaru and Rhinocorura on the Sinai border, a region whose name meant "cut-off noses." Corporal punishment was prescribed in ancient Israel, but it was limited to 40 lashes. In China, some criminals were also disfigured, but other criminals were tattooed. Some states gained a reputation for their cruel use of such punishments; Sparta, in particular, used them as part of a disciplinary regime which was designed to increase willpower and physical strength. Although the Spartan example was extreme, corporal punishment was possibly the most frequent type of punishment. In the Roman Empire, the maximum penalty which a Roman citizen could receive under the law was 40 "lashes" or 40 "strokes" with a whip which was applied to the back and shoulders, or 40 lashes or strokes with the "fasces" which were applied to the buttocks. Such punishments could draw blood, and they were frequently inflicted in public.
Quintilian voiced some opposition to the use of corporal punishment. According to Wilson, "probably no more lucid indictment of it has been made in the succeeding two thousand years".
Plutarch, also in the first century, writes:

Middle Ages

In Medieval Europe, the Byzantine Empire blinded and removed the noses of some criminals and rival emperors. Their belief that the emperor should be physically ideal meant that such disfigurement notionally disqualified the recipient from office. Elsewhere, corporal punishment was encouraged by the attitudes of the Catholic church towards the human body, flagellation being a common means of self-discipline. This influenced the use of corporal punishment in schools, as educational establishments were closely attached to the church during this period. Nevertheless, corporal punishment was not used uncritically; as early as the 11th century Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury was speaking out against what he saw as the excessive use of corporal punishment in the treatment of children.

Modernity

From the 16th century onwards, new trends were seen in corporal punishment. Judicial punishments were increasingly turned into public spectacles, with public beatings of criminals intended as a deterrent to other would-be offenders. Meanwhile, early writers on education, such as Roger Ascham, complained of the arbitrary manner in which children were punished.
Peter Newell writes that perhaps the most influential writer on the subject was the English philosopher John Locke, whose Some Thoughts Concerning Education explicitly criticised the central role of corporal punishment in education. Locke's work was highly influential and may have helped influence Polish legislators to ban corporal punishment from Poland's schools in 1783, the first country in the world to do so.
A consequence of this mode of thinking was a reduction in the use of corporal punishment in the 19th century in Europe and North America. In some countries, this was encouraged by scandals involving individuals seriously hurt during acts of corporal punishment. For instance, in Britain, popular opposition to punishment was encouraged by two significant cases, the death of Private Frederick John White, who died after a military flogging in 1846, and the death of Reginald Cancellor, killed by his schoolmaster in 1860. Events such as these mobilised public opinion and, by the late nineteenth century, the extent of corporal punishment's use in state schools was unpopular with many parents in England. Authorities in Britain and some other countries introduced more detailed rules for the infliction of corporal punishment in government institutions such as schools, prisons, and reformatories. By the First World War, parents' complaints about disciplinary excesses in England had died down, and corporal punishment was established as an expected form of school discipline.
In the 1870s, courts in the United States overruled the common-law principle that a husband had the right to "physically chastise an errant wife". In the UK, the traditional right of a husband to inflict moderate corporal punishment on his wife to keep her "within the bounds of duty" was similarly removed in 1891. See Domestic violence for more information.
In the United Kingdom, the use of judicial corporal punishment declined during the first half of the twentieth century and it was abolished altogether in the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, whereby whipping and flogging were outlawed except for use in very serious internal prison discipline cases, while most other European countries had abolished it earlier. Meanwhile, in many schools, the use of the cane, paddle or tawse remained commonplace in the UK and the United States until the 1980s. In rural areas of the Southern United States, and in several other countries, it still is: see School corporal punishment.

International treaties

Human rights

Key developments related to corporal punishment occurred in the late 20th century. Years with particular significance to the prohibition of corporal punishment are emphasised.