Corporal punishment is concentrated on society’s least powerful members

Evidence

The child’s observation — that violence is not just about discipline but about who the adults think matters — was not a sophisticated analytical framework that had been handed to the child by adult advocates. It was an observation drawn from the children’s consultation data, from what children in Uganda had said about their own experiences. But it was also, from a theoretical standpoint, precisely the analysis that feminist and post-colonial scholars of childhood had been developing: that corporal punishment is not distributed randomly in any society, but is concentrated on those with the least power and the fewest resources for resistance. — , The Rod and the Child, 9994

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to feminist and post-colonial scholarship of childhood and to the power-asymmetry analysis in other readings on institutionalized violence.

Related

• Corporal punishment is the world’s most prevalent violence against any population group (similarity 0.83)
• Adult-centric debate about corporal punishment systematically omitted children’s own account (similarity 0.81)
• Child beating is enabled by structural conditions, not just individual choices (similarity 0.81)
• Children learn power rather than moral rules from being physically punished (similarity 0.80)
• Child corporal punishment persists even among the wealthiest African households (similarity 0.80)
• The high prevalence of corporal punishment in Africa is historically contingent, not fixed destiny. (similarity 0.80)
• Researchers on corporal punishment face organized institutional resistance (similarity 0.80)
• The discipline-abuse boundary reflects institutional social power, not empirical discontinuities in parental acts (similarity 0.80)
• Researching corporal punishment requires different methods than abuse because children see it as justified (similarity 0.79)
• Punishment peaks at the ages when prefrontal control is most absent (similarity 0.79)
• Institutional discipline correlates inversely with corporal violence. (similarity 0.78)
• Collective shaming discipline is psychologically violent though non-corporal (similarity 0.78)
• Distributed daily violence can exceed concentrated formal punishment in severity. (similarity 0.78)
• India is the single country with the most children experiencing physical punishment (similarity 0.78)
• Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest child corporal punishment rate of any world region (similarity 0.78)