The discipline-abuse boundary reflects institutional social power, not empirical discontinuities in parental acts

Evidence

The paper predicted, on theoretical grounds, what the distributional survey evidence would subsequently confirm: the boundary between discipline and abuse is maintained by institutional decision-making that reflects social power rather than by any empirical discontinuity in the severity distribution of parental physical acts. Foundational to understanding why the definitional problem is structural rather than resolvable by clearer standards alone. — , The Rod and the Child, 10371

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the book’s broader argument that child-abuse categories are social constructs, and connects to Giovannoni-Becerra’s vignette divergences across professional and community groups. — connects to: Institutional structures, not ideology, determined severity of corporal practice — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 2235; Age-set cohorts, not biological parents, performed routine discipline in pre-colonial Bantu societies — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4256; Child beating is enabled by structural conditions, not just individual choices — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4998 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the structural/definitional problem of the abuse-discipline split as a matter of social construction rather than natural kinds.