I might have done reasonably well in a school that didn’t have CP at all so long as I was treated fairly. I would not have done well at all in a sexist school (one where only girls were exempt from CP) because I would have been treated unfairly from day one and constantly thereafter. […]

If you treat a child unfairly you’re highly likely to cause resentment and do considerable harm. Even if you try to be fair, by your own definition, the child might not consider it so and will react accordingly. I know how I would have reacted if I had been treated unfairly at school – my […]

You also have State governments that simply filled in the years between the declaration of Capital Punishment as a cruel & unusual punishment & the revocation of that/execution of Gary Gilmour by stockpiling death sentences, rather than abolishing it in line with the original judgement. OK, I know Western Australia kept it longer than anyone […]

Worse still are those who rush to judgment on the basis of prior knowledge of a student or hearsay accounts of an event that leads to wrongful paddling that is irreversible and even worse are those who paddle in proportion to their spontaneous outrage. Thanks for starting this thread. IMO TWP II was getting inundated. […]

I’m sure that’s true to some extent, although I have no idea how one would estimate just how prevalent it was. On the other hand, I really don’t see how anyone would class the old Scottish method of CP, using a tawse across the hand, as sexual. Fairness and moderation were not my experience and […]

Most teachers and administrators think they are fair, but from the child’s point of view, it’s a very one-sided situation. I guess that the next stage of the discussion would involve assertions that the arbitrary and unfair nature was of particular concern with corporal punishment, rather than with any other type of punishment, for two […]

The legal system of the United States,  offers many more protections for adults accused of crimes than schools do for children who face corporal punishment. The child has no advocate or attorney to speak for him, and he probably lacks the verbal skills to defend himself adequately. Even though he is supposed to have due […]

So many of these pro-cp posts romanticize corporal punishment, weaving a myth of some golden age when there were no problems in schools that couldn’t be addressed with a sore bottom. Underlying statements such as “It never did me any harm” is the assumption that if it didn’t do me harm, it didn’t harm anyone else. Not every negative […]

“It’s not hard to find accounts of people who feel they’d been brutalised by sadistic teachers in school. However I believe they’re vastly outnumbered by people who realised they’d been appropriately punished for wrongdoing and don’t bear a grudge. Go to any poll or discussion which seems to reflect the account of ordinary people and […]