Corporal punishment survey 45

KeithInUK 218

Oct 24, 2015#441

Hi Jerry

I found your latest post very interesting and I have a couple of questions about your school.

When girls were slippered, do you know whether the slipper was applied over the skirt or over the knickers with the skirt lifted out of the way?

You also mentioned that girls were occasionally caned by the headmistress – do you know whether this was on the hands or on the bottom? And if it was on the bottom, I have the same question as above – was it over the skirt or over the knickers?

You might have seen that I was recently having a discussion earlier in this thread about this, so it would be interesting to know how it was done at your school.

Keith

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Another_Lurker 10K289

Oct 25, 2015#442

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Guest

Oct 25, 2015#443

Hello Keith,
I have no way of knowing for sure but I would be surprised if girls had their skirts lifted out of the way to be punished. I suppose it isn’t out of the question – that did happen with the one punishment I witnessed in primary school but my feeling is that because my secondary school seemed to try to keep things between the boys and the girls pretty equal that they wouldn’t have punished girls on the knickers unless boys had been punished on their pants and that didn’t happen. And when girls were caned, again, I believe it was on the bottom – it certainly was in some cases and I don’t have any reason to think that that wasn’t normal. But my own experience showed there were no qualms about caning on the hands, so I can’t be absolutely certain. I think that by my time, it’s almost certain that when the cane was used it was in the same way for boys and girls, and that seemed to be that it was always six of the best on the bottom, with extra strokes on the hands being possible for the recalcitrant.
I’ve just noticed you asked me a couple of other questions I haven’t answered. Yes, I have been caned where the last stroke of a caning was deliberately laid to cross the previous strokes, but the situation was very contrived and not typical of a school type caning. One of my regular ‘partners’ wanted to try and do it, and I agreed to go along with it, but when we came down to it, he found it very difficult to get the right angle for the last stroke. The only way we could manage it was for me to move from the chair I had been bending over for the first six strokes to lie on a bed which interrupted everything. It certainly hurt a great deal but I think the seventh stroke coming a few seconds after the sixth would have hurt more than that delayed stroke – with the first eight or nine strokes of the cane, the pain of the individual stroke increases with every stroke as long as the delay between them isn’t too great.
And, yes, marks on the thighs do seem to take longer to fade than marks on the bottom, but I’ve never really deliberately timed it, and I’m much more aware of marks on the thighs (which is why I don’t choose to be caned there – where it’s happened, it’s been by accident). I take fitness seriously, attending a sports club regularly and I take care to avoid the people there knowing about my other life, which means having to be aware of my marking and avoiding doing things that would make them visible when marking is present. In particular, I can’t swim with cane marks on my legs.

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Guest

Oct 25, 2015#444

Hello Another_Lurker,
I’m not sure what watching the girl slippered would have done to me in terms of my fears of my own impending punishment. I asked her later, what she had got and she told me it was four whacks (presumably across the seat of her skirt) and she didn’t like it, but I think if I’d been watching seeing four whacks would not have been particularly frightening. Actually, I might have felt reassured by the hope that that was all I was going to get (a hope that would have probably been dashed a moment later). If they’d made her cry that might have been sufficiently frightening, but I don’t know if it did or not.
Looking back, I don’t think it would be fair to say that the Music Master was twisting the knife in asking the lady to remain in the room. I think it’s likely that part of the reason for having a witness was to protect the teacher from false accusations of impropriety as well as any intention of protecting us children from somebody going too far or doing something they shouldn’t. If that was the case, it would make sense to me that he wouldn’t want the witness out of the room at that point. I had already been asked earlier on if I would have preferred to have a male witness and I had declined. Even if I had known I was going to have to expose my underwear, I still would have rather had her than a random male staff member (although if I had feared further exposure, I wouldn’t have).
I think it’s worth saying that – except for the obvious and very real fear of the pain inherently involved, I felt totally safe during both my punishments at school. Safe but totally powerless.
The idea of a school nurse checking before and after is one that I find interesting. I think I actually think that makes a lot of sense – especially the ‘before’ bit. My parents were overseas at the time I was caned but if they had been home they’d have been very aware of what was going on – parents were informed if their child was caned (I’m not sure if they were informed in advance or after the fact, but I know they were informed) – but in my case, I’d also been questioned by police. By the time I was 14, my parents didn’t use corporal punishment for minor things anymore (when I was younger, smacking had been the normal response to any naughtiness) but this was serious enough that I think if they’d been in the country I might have already been given a good hiding at home before I was caned and although my parents weren’t abusive (at least not by the standards back then) some probably were. I actually don’t think I would have found it particularly embarrassing to be checked by our Matron, either. She was a trained nurse and I accepted that medical people, even a woman, could see whatever they wanted to.
The ‘high’ I get after being caned takes a couple of minutes to kick in. With one or two extended ‘punishments’ I’ve received, I think it began to kick in during the proceedings and I found that very interesting but generally it comes afterwards.
I certainly have no desire of any sort to experience anything on the scale of the judicial punishments meted out in Singapore or Malaysia but I have experienced a ‘light version’ of that type of punishment (using a normal cane, not an especially vicious one, with no intention of breaking the skin -it would have stopped immediately if that had happened). I’ve actually quite seriously pondered the idea that that could be of genuine use in our own justice system as an alternative to fines for minor offences. But part of that may be that I don’t like spending money much. While I am it, I will also say that especially with juvenile crime, I actually don’t think school style canings would have been a bad idea. I was cautioned by police over the same incident for which I was caned, and the caution was, honestly, a complete joke. I got told off worse at school for not doing my homework (and in that situation, I also knew that if I didn’t show sufficient remorse, I could get slippered or even caned, and took it more seriously, than a police inspector I didn’t know telling me how much I’d let my parents down).
Looking back, I am pretty sure the Music Master was of the opinion that if you had to cane a boy, you had to make sure it was very unpleasant and that’s what he set out to do. I’m not sure if his manner wasn’t entirely an act, or maybe it did reflect the fact he didn’t like doing what he was doing and it was how he got through it. Whatever it was, it was effective from my end.
Reading the article you have given me a link to, I really wonder at what was really going on in schools at the time. I had no real way of knowing what was going on at most schools, of course – I only had knowledge of my own school and a couple of others that I had friends at, but if you had asked me in 1994, what percentage of independent schools were still using the cane, I think I would have made a guess that it was something like a quarter of them – a minority, certainly, but not a small minority. We had the impression, I think, that our school was a little bit unusual, but certainly not that it was as unusual as the article in ‘The Independent’ would suggest. In fact, I think if we had thought it was that rare, somebody would have been trying to get it stopped in the school – there were petitions about girls being able to wear trousers, petitions about being able to leave the school grounds during breaktimes, petitions about being able to spend break times indoors during winter – they never seemed to pay any attention to any of our petitions but we seemed to be encouraged to make them. I never saw a petition about abolishing the cane.
You’ve asked how my caning and slippering were administered. I’ll come back to that in a later message. The slippering is reasonably straightforward, but the caning is one of my favourite anecdotes about my life and I want to try and do it justice and it’s getting late.
Yes, I was into computers as a boy. Not obsessively, but I had advantages that most boys didn’t and I took advantage of them. Both of my parents worked for one of Britain’s preeminent government scientific bodies – I won’t name it for fear of google but it is pretty much where the British internet began and we could access their network from our home and this meant I did have some access to the internet. I did also use a number of BBS. This is where I got the pornography I sold and a large number of computer games. I did run something close to a real business selling the pornography, but the game I copied for the girl was more of a one off – she was desperate for it and while I did charge her for it (only the cost of blank discs), my real intent was to try and make her like me. Getting her slippered didn’t really help my cause that much.

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KeithInUK 218

Oct 26, 2015#445

Hello Jerry

Thanks for you very full reply. You said:

I have no way of knowing for sure but I would be surprised if girls had their skirts lifted out of the way to be punished. I suppose it isn’t out of the question – that did happen with the one punishment I witnessed in primary school but my feeling is that because my secondary school seemed to try to keep things between the boys and the girls pretty equal that they wouldn’t have punished girls on the knickers unless boys had been punished on their pants and that didn’t happen. And when girls were caned, again, I believe it was on the bottom – it certainly was in some cases and I don’t have any reason to think that that wasn’t normal. But my own experience showed there were no qualms about caning on the hands, so I can’t be absolutely certain. I think that by my time, it’s almost certain that when the cane was used it was in the same way for boys and girls, and that seemed to be that it was always six of the best on the bottom, with extra strokes on the hands being possible for the recalcitrant.

That’s interesting. As you may have seen earlier in this thread, I’ve always wondered whether administering the cane through a skirt was really effective. My view is that, in a bending over position, a normal school skirt would not be tight against the lower part of the bottom – it would be hanging down freely with a slight air gap between it and the bottom, which would impede the action of a cane. So in practice, the target area would be restricted to the middle part of the bottom only. And as we discussed recently, it’s the lower part of the bottom that is the most sensitive area where cane strokes would be more effective, and provide more of a reminder of the punishment when sitting down afterwards. (Of course this wouldn’t have applied to boys, as trousers would be tight against the whole of the bottom when bending over.)

What do you think – does this seem reasonable to you?

Keith

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Guest

Oct 29, 2015#446

Hello Keith,
I an see what you are saying about the air gap idea but I wonder how much of a difference it really would have made. The school skirts the girls wore were pretty long and reasonably loose. I think the length and weight probably held them down so there might not have been that much gap. If we’d bent over with our legs at right angles to the ground, there probably would have been more chance of a gap but on my limited experience you were more bending forward with your feet a little bit behind your bottom, so the skirt was probably pretty close to resting on the back of the legs and the gap would have been pretty limited. I’m not sure the cane would have been all that impeded anyway, unless the skirt was tight. But it’s not that easy to say for sure. I didn’t do detailed studies of the skirts, nor do I recall seeing a girl bending over in one very often for any reason.
If there was an issue, I think it’s much more likely they probably did concentrate the strokes on the area of the bottom that was against the skirt rather than lift it out of the way or anything. That might have made some difference to whether girls were truly caned as severely as the boys given that I think that a stroke on that area is less painful, but it also might have increased the chance of them getting strokes on top of strokes. I think given we were wearing different clothing, it might have been impossible to say that the punishments were truly identical – in fact I would say that boys probably had an advantage in summer and girls in winter simply based on our thick our trousers were compared to the skirts the girls wore – they had a distinct summer and winter uniform, we didn’t (although we didn’t have to wear our blazers in summer). I think getting as close as they reasonably good to equal treatment was all they were really likely to try to do. I don’t think they would have been obsessed with trying to ensure it was exactly the same for everybody. Besides anything else, we were caned by different people.
The bottom line (if I can use that phrase!) was that anybody who got caned certainly got what I would describe as severely punished and I am pretty sure found it extremely painful and if pain was going to stop them doing it again I’m sure it was painful enough for that.
If I had been aware that the crime I was slippered for was one that could have got me caned again, there is no way I would have risked it. I only did it because I didn’t see it as the same thing. If I had thought it was, the very idea of the possibility of being caned again would have made me think it just wasn’t worth it. It was a deterrent for me. I didn’t go around doing things that got me into much trouble but I know other kids who did seem to become much more careful about behaving after being caned. The slipper worked as a deterrent as well – just the threat of it happening again was enough to make sure I did what the teacher wanted me to do after a number of previous reprimands had done nothing. I assume there were probably some kids who it didn’t effect that way but for me it was definitely a deterrent.

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KeithInUK 218

Oct 30, 2015#447

Hello Jerry,

Thanks for another very comprehensive reply!

Yes, I can see what you mean – maybe my reservations about caning through a skirt are unnecessary, although I still think it would have been easier for the caner (and more painful for the recipient!) if the skirt was lifted. It’s interesting that it was done this way in some schools (even in some mixed-sex state schools judging by some of the entries earlier in this thread).

I was thinking that, if corporal punishment was still allowed in our schools, I wonder whether we would have seen so many girls wearing trousers to school!

Keith

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Another_Lurker 10K289

Nov 02, 2015#448

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KeithInUK 218

Nov 02, 2015#449

Hello Another_Lurker

You said:

Seriously, I don’t think we’re likely to have JCP any time soon in the UK, with or without membership of the EU. And probably a good thing too.

I’d agree with you about JCP but, if we leave the EU, I’m wondering whether SCP might eventually be reinstated in the UK, especially if the Tories remain in power for a good while. I suspect a majority of the UK electorate would probably be in favour of that, provided it is treated as a “last resort” sanction (short of expulsion). It would also be interesting to see whether girls would then be treated absolutely the same as boys in these enlightened days of equality.

What is your view on this?

BTW, I don’t think you ever responded to my question (earlier in this thread) about how the prefects administered canings (and slipperings?) in the Prefects Court at your school. I’d be interested to hear more details!

Keith

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Another_Lurker 10K289

Nov 04, 2015#450

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