Six Strokes Of The Cane18

The banning of the cane wasn’t down to a single vote in parliament. Society has been using less and less violent punishments for years and years. (In the 1700s, criminals were hung drawn and quartered in public; in the 1800s people were hanged in public for quite minor offences; in the 1900s only the worst murderers were hanged; the 2000 we’ve stopped killing criminals altogether.) Most parents do still believe in giving small children a light “smack” or “slap”, but you’d have to look hard for someone who believed in a severe whipping with a belt or slipper. That sort of thing had died out even before it became technically illegal. And there had been less and less CP in schools in the years before it was banned: in 1980, some schools still used the cane but hardly any still believed in the sort of pants-down birchings that were so popular in the Victorian period. Of course, it’s quite possible that there was too much CP in the olden days, not enough now, but that in 1975 there was exactly the right amount. But I think that there was a gradual process, and successive generations said “Big people hitting little people? With sticks? Yuck!”