The Anatomy of Corporal Punishment

When I was a kid, trouble was an artform and a career. I fought, bullied, and argued to such a degree that I was getting suspended nearly every month. And in my parent’s frustration, after an hour of lecturing, they would bend me down and hit me with a thin stick, desperately trying to wean me off my ways. This routine was affectionately called “corporal punishment”: logical, retaliatory, always unfortunate but done for your best interest, even though it never really worked on me.

I saw a little kid getting beaten while I was walking around Newton Hawker a few months back — beaten as in actually beaten, not just “corporal punishment”. He carelessly slipped and fell behind, but when I turned around in amusement, I saw his mother kick him straight in the chest. The bystanders realized, in that moment, filtering through their experiences, that this wasn’t corporal punishment. The pulsing rage in the mother’s arms. The callous and unapologetic shouts. It defied every expectation of the private, solemn, noble and sacrificial act that is corporal punishment. This was assault. 

Corporal punishment differs from assault in that corporal punishment is completely expected. The entire process is almost streamlined. You knew what was going to happen — in fact, you were probably joking about what was going to happen — as you stole that slice of cake. You were still laughing as you stood by your friends in the corridor, the minutes ticking by as you waited for your parents. You felt the anxiety well up as you were being driven home. The shouting and lecturing was always done in the same way, in the same room, with the same tone, of the same lessons, with the same familiar fuzziness in your mind as you realize how predictable and avoidable everything is. And so when you were struck, you not only realized that you completely deserved it, but were already weighing the pros and cons of your next crime. 

But clearly, not everyone thinks of it this way. Among the bystanders was this white man, whom I assume was born of a culture not as reliant on corporal punishment as mine. To him, there was no need to rationalize any love out of the mothers action. He saw the situation plainly: an adult beating a defenseless child, and shouted while we processed the subversive act. When I asked him if he had considered the mother’s position, and with an air of certainty, he spat out: “I don’t want to argue with you about this. I just saw a kid getting beaten.” Further down, I heard the only comment directed at the mother by someone other than the white man. A youngish man walked by the mother, shook his head at her, and simply lamented: “you cannot do that”. She then silently picked up the child, a gesture that sent all of us awkwardly fleeing from the scene. Her now apologetic form, head bowed down, was seemingly enough for her amnesty; almost as if we were satisfied by her effort to bring nobility back into corporal punishment.

This is all a very roundabout way of stating that: the only real difference between “corporal punishment” and childbeating is simply that “corporal punishment” has the luxury of a PR team. What made the situation horrifying wasn’t how badly the mother could have hurt her own child; the situation was horrifying because it somehow defied the tradition of corporal punishment, and crossed over to assault. 

Morality is confusing. Many times it demands us to discipline ourselves and do good to others, but other times, it almost feels like it criminalizes benign acts and justifies injustices. The reason for this capriciousness is that moral rules are usually constructed around emotional issues. For a moral rule to form, it has to be the collective opinion for a long enough time to be internalized. However, morality only focuses on the things that we are emotionally connected to. The things that people don’t take into account, or the things that seem less important, won’t register in our moral intuition. 

This effect plays into both our views on corporal punishment. The collective expectation for parents to control and shape the lives of children, combined with the frustration felt over children stepping out of line, gave rise to the expectation for parents to further exert their control over their children when rules are broken. Corporal punishment was a simple extension of that logic. But hurting others, especially your own children, is a terrible experience. So to remedy that contradiction, the parent must also try to find a way to signal their guilt. That is the reason why corporal punishment is still treated with such privacy even if a community completely condones the practice: it signals that they feel guilty. Shown this way, you realize that all these rules around corporal punishment is really just an extension of balancing the expectation to control children with the apologetics that comes with beating them. 

And that is the major issue there. Nowhere in this equation are the actual harms or benefits of corporal punishment even considered, because morality doesn't care about harms or benefits. It only really cares about deciding which emotions should be prioritized in the situation. We support capital punishment even though studies have proven it to be an ineffective deterrent because we want revenge. We eat pigs and cows but not dogs or cats, despite them being just as intelligent, because we don’t find pigs or cows cute. And so, for too many times in my life, watching someone try to be moral often feels like they are just trying to be emotional. 

The path of being a moral person isn’t to remember rules. It’s to see past the surface of these rules, and to trace them to their roots: our emotions and expectations. It helps to remember why we put family to such high regards, to realize why these standards often feel so convoluted and corrupted, and to know how we can go back to following the spirit of the law. Corporal punishment is not merely an unfortunate thing that happens, it symbolizes what happens when we leave our anxieties and our feelings of frustration unexamined.