But what if I had believed in the efficacy of CP? I once asked myself whether, if I had sincerely believed in the merits and morality of corporal punishment, and hadn’t enjoyed administering it in the way I did, I would have used it more often, less often, or about about the same. I spent quite some time considering this, including examining many actual cases of slipperings I had handed out, and the inescapable conclusion I reached was that in many of those cases, I would not have used corporal punishment. That is not to say that the punishments in those cases breached the rules, because they didn’t, strictly speaking. But if I approached those cases purely from a perspective of what the purpose of CP was supposed to be, including the deterrent element, I would have simply given mere warnings to many of those girls, instead of the slipperings I did give them.

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