Murray Straus, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, found that children who were spanked or experienced other corporal punishment are at higher risk, as adolescents and adults, of verbally or physically coercing their partner into having sex.
Straus analyzed a study, International Dating Violence, of more than 14,000 college students at 68 universities in 32 countries. Students were asked if they had been frequently spanked or beaten before the age of 12 and if they had coerced a sexual partner in the previous 12 months. “It’s further evidence that parents shouldn’t hit if their children’s well-being is at stake,” Straus said.
The study revealed that men who experienced corporal punishment were four times more likely to physically force their partner to have sex than those who had not experienced corporal punishment. Coercion includes holding or hitting someone. Women who experienced corporal punishment were also more likely to coerce their partner to have sex than those who had not been spanked.
Straus presented the findings at an American Psychological Association summit and stated, “People generalize that the use of coercion, physical coercion, is okay. They learn that from the people they love and respect – their parents.”
Straus said this study is consistent with other studies, showing that corporal punishment leads to low self-control and self-esteem, as well as aggressiveness, antisocial personalities, and the understanding that violence is okay, which can lead to coercion. sexual. He stressed that there are alternative ways of disciplining children that work better and have no side effects.
Alice Miller, the leading psychologist who has devoted her career to child abuse in its many forms, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, and child sexual abuse, has presented the same results as Straus. Miller studied and wrote about the effects of poisonous pedagogy on children and into adulthood, and the resulting effects on society as a whole.
Twenty-one states allow corporal punishment in school. In the 2004-2005 school year, 272,028 school-age children in the United States were subjected to physical punishment. This is a significant drop of almost 10%, continuing a consistent trend since the early 1980s. This statistic does not include corporal punishment in the home.
States that allow corporal punishment are: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania (some districts schoolchildren prohibited corporal punishment), Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming.
A study of 8,000 American families revealed (Straus, MA and Yodanis, CL, 1994). Seventy-eight percent of states that practice rowing achieved a level below the national average at the fourth grade level in reading. Seventy-five percent of rowing states scored below the national average in reading at the eighth grade level (Center for Effective Discipline, 2004). Sixty-seven percent of Ohio rowing schools ranked in the lowest 25% of schools on state school report cards in the 99-00 school year (Center for Effective Discipline, 2001).
Miller shows, with the help of his research, books, articles, interviews, and responses to readers’ emails on his website, that child abuse such as beatings and humiliation does not just produce unhappy and confused children, not just destructive and destructive teens. abusive parents, but also a confused society, which works irrationally.
Miller sees the roots of global violence in the fact that children are beaten around the world, especially during their early years, when their brains are getting structured. The damages caused by this practice are devastating, but sadly the dots are rarely connected by society. The facts are easy to understand: children are forbidden to defend themselves against violence inflicted on them, their only recourse is to bring natural reactions like anger and fear deep into their psyche, and then, as adults, unload these strong emotions against yours. children or entire nations. Miller illustrates this dynamic in his books using not only his case histories, but also his numerous studies on the biographies of famous dictators and artists. The origin of this problem in every society you know reveals that extremely irrational behavior, brutality, sadism and other perversions can occur without disruption in families (who claim their right to “discipline” their children and that the products can considered as “genetically conditioned.” Alice Miller believes that only by becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence, she dedicated her life’s work to this enlightenment.
Alice Miller developed a concept of therapy that suggests that we must confront our history and acknowledge and thus reduce the still unconscious but very active fear of the child who had previously been beaten internally. When we finally manage to feel our justification, anger, and outrage rather than deny it, we can become autonomous and free to choose how to live our lives, unbound by religious rhetoric or family tradition. . Because it is this childhood fear of abusive parents that leads adults to abuse their own children, as well as to live with serious illnesses instead of taking seriously the cruelties they once endured. Innumerable esoteric and “religious” offerings serve to obscure the pain resulting from torture once suffered, but totally denied.
Miller believes that his discovery, despite its tragic aspects, actually contains very optimistic options because it opens the door to consciousness, to the awareness of childhood reality and, therefore, to liberation from its destructive consequences. She understands her search for the reality of childhood as a strong opposition to psychoanalysis which, in her opinion, remains in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents. For this reason, Miller resigned his membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988.
Alice Miller’s work reveals:
o Poor children, minorities, children with disabilities and children are beaten more often in schools, sometimes at a rate 2 to 5 times higher than that of other children.
o Academic performance is a risk factor in the use of corporal punishment by children.
o Significantly more school shooting deaths were found in states that allow corporal punishment in schools than those that do not.
o School violence has not increased since rowing decreased. Violent crime in schools has fallen dramatically since 1994. The annual rate of serious violent crime in 2003 (6 per 1,000 students) was less than half the rate in 1994.
o There is overwhelming evidence that severe interventions are harmful to children, both emotionally and physically. The effects of such trauma can be compounded when a child has pre-existing learning difficulties. When schools respond to these challenges with harsh methods, children can be even more traumatized.
o School corporal punishment is used more in the southern and southwestern states and in rural districts than in urban and suburban districts.
o Corporal punishment has been abolished in more than 100 nations of the world, but not in the US.
o Corporal punishment teaches children that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems. Research shows that this message is taught to those who inflict pain, those who receive it, and those who witness it.
o Corporal punishment of children is related to less internalization of moral rules, greater aggression, more antisocial behavior, greater criminality, lower mental health outcomes, greater abusive adult behavior, and greater risk of being the victim of abusive relationships in the adulthood.
o Corporal punishment reinforces physical aggression as an acceptable and effective means of eliminating unwanted behavior in our society.