I’m really not particularly familiar with flagellant literature. I’ve encountered some of it, and what I’ve seen, seems to me to exaggerate quite a few things. Perhaps they do use heavier canes, or larger ones and that’s what they are worried about. Perhaps they use the wrong type of cane – one thing that we have stressed to parents over the years is that you can’t use garden canes. Our school gets proper canes from a proper supplier, but that’s not easy for everybody to do. The wrong type of cane could be dangerous.
I have, on a handful of occasions, more than three decades ago now, caned boys on the bottom. I did so with the intention of increasing the severity of the punishment in cases of extreme misbehavior, in cases where boys should have properly been expelled and I wanted to make it very clear to them that they were in the most serious trouble.