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Part I
Prevalence and Social Causes of Spanking
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Spanking and other forms of legal corporal punishment by parents is the primordial violence in two senses. First, as shown in the next chapter, over 90% of U.S. parents spank or slap toddlers. Of this 90%, at least one third of parents start hitting their children when they are less than a year old. Thus, for almost everyone in the United States and most other nations, the first experience of being the victim of a deliberate physical attack is in the form of being slapped or spanked by parents who wish to correct what they perceive as misbehavior.
The second way in which spanking is the primordial violence became evident when this book was being considered for publication. Some reviewers objected to the title The Primordial Violence because, as one put it, primordial has connotations of the beginnings of the earth and the primordial soup. But, for better or worse, that is exactly the connotation we intended. We believe that spanking is the primordial violence, not only because it is usually a child's first experience with violence, but even more because research shows that it is one of the bases out of which almost all other violence grows. Ironically, this is because parents spank for the morally correct and socially important purpose of correcting misbehavior and preparing a child to be a law-abiding citizen. Thus, spanking teaches the morality of violence. Chapter 5, for example, shows that approval and use of spanking is correlated with approval of other types of violence, even including torture. All five chapters in Part IV and the longitudinal studies summarized in Chapter 19 show that the more a child was spanked, the greater the probability that he or she will approve of or engage in violence and other crime later in life.
What Is Spanking?
We define corporal punishment as the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child's behavior. This definition is discussed in more detail in Straus (2001a).
What to Call It?
In the United States and Canada spank and spanking are sometimes used to refer to slapping a child on the buttocks and also to slapping a child on other parts of the body. In Great Britain and other English-language nations, the equivalent terms are smack and smacking. Although these are the most common terms, there are many others such as thrash, beat, belt, paddle, warm his butt, whipping, and whupping. Even U.S. President Barack Obama, who is on record as not spanking, used one of those terms in a speech at the centennial convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on July17, 2009. He said, “And by the way, we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters. We need to go back to the time, back to the day when we parents saw somebody, saw some kid fooling around and—it wasn't your child, but they'll whup you anyway.”
When Obama and others use terms like whup him or beat him, they usually mean hitting on the buttocks or slapping a child, not the severe attacks that they would signify for relationships between adults. They refer to forms of spanking that are legal in every state in the United States and in most other nations. In the United States, legal spanking includes hitting with traditionally accepted objects such as a hairbrush or belt, provided that no serious injury results. Chapter 2, which is on the prevalence of spanking in the United States, shows that 28% of parents of children age 5 to 12 had hit their child with one of these traditionally approved objects in the previous 12 months.
Hit is a synonym for spank that we use from time to time. Those who believe spanking is appropriate and necessary may object to hit because, as Rosemond (1994b) says in his widely read book To Spank or Not To Spank, “calling spanking hitting is nothing more than misleading propaganda. Even people who are not on one side or the other of the spanking debate may object on the basis of biased terminology because hit has a negative connotation.” Our view is that hit is no more biased than spank. The difference is in the direction of the bias. Spank and smack describes hitting a child, but with the connotation of a socially and legally approved act. When an adult physically punishes another adult for some misbehavior such as flirting with his wife, it is called assault. However, the assault laws of all U.S. states and most other nations contain a specific exemption for hitting a child to correct misbehavior. It is only in the case of children that we search for neutral words or euphemisms. We do not think there is a neutral word in everyday English that describes using spanking against a child. In this book, we use spank most of the time because that word is in the questions asked parents or children to obtain the data analyzed. In addition, as previously noted, parents use spank and smack to mean hitting in general (as defined above) not just hitting on the buttocks.
Outside the academic world, almost no parent uses corporal punishment to describe what they do to correct misbehavior. We have found that when we talk about corporal punishment, some parents don't realize we are talking about spanking or slapping a child's buttocks or hand. This was illustrated when one of us was interviewing the mother of a four-year-old. The child repeatedly interrupted the mother despite the mother's pleas. Finally, she slapped the child on the shoulder. Then, somewhat embarrassed, she explained “There are times when nothing except spanking will get a child to mind” (emphasis added). It is also illustrated by a book for parents that says that at about 18 to 24 months, “spanking means a brief swat on the fingers or leg at the instant of infraction” (Guarendi & Eich, 1990).
Spanking, Violence, and Child Abuse
Is Spanking Violence?
Some parents we have talked to say they don't hit their kids, even though they have just told us about spanking the child when necessary. Few Americans think of an occasional slap on the hand or butt to correct a child's misbehavior as a physical attack or violence, although they would think of an occasional slap of another adult as a physical attack or violence. This is because violence refers to culturally disapproved uses of physical force. People who favor the death penalty do not think of executions as violence, but people who are opposed to the death penalty do. Similarly, the three quarters of Americans shown in Chapter 18 who believe that a good hard spanking is sometimes necessary, dismiss the idea that spanking is a form of violence. Before the largely feminist-based effort to end violence against women, if a husband occasionally slapped his wife, it was considered a family fight, not family violence. Before the 20th century, slapping a wife was often legally identified as physically chastising. Until the 1870s in the United States, husbands had the legal right to physically chastise their wives (Calvert, 1974); that is, they were permitted to use corporal punishment, just as parents still have this right with children. For most of the 20th century, police, in some jurisdictions, followed an informal “stitch rule.” This directed them to avoid making an arrest in family disturbance cases unless there was an injury that required stitches or other immediate medical attention (Straus, 1976). In economically developed nations today, very few still believe that an occasional slap by a husband to correct misbehavior by his wife is harmless, but many believe that an occasional slap by a parent to correct misbehavior by a child is morally correct and harmless.
To understand the reasoning behind identifying spanking as a form of violence, it is necessary to start with the definition of violence:
Violence is “an act carried out with the intention of, or perceived as having the intention of physically hurting another person.” (Gelles & Straus, 1979, p. 553)
The physical hurt can range from slight pain, as in a slap, to murder. The basis for intent to hurt may range from a concern with a child's safety (as when a child is spanked for going into the street) to hostility so intense that the death of the other is desired (Gelles & Straus, 1979, p. 554). Now compare the definition of violence with the definition of spanking given in the previous section: “The use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child's behavior.”
The difference between the two definitions is that the definition of spanking is restricted to attacks that are not intended to cause injury and to attacks that are for purposes of correction and control. This makes spanking an example of instrumental violence (Gelles & Straus, 1979), that is, violence perpetrated to achieve some end other than pain or injury as an end in itself, such as hitting a wife or husband just because of anger and fury. The latter is called expressive violence. When parents are angry at the chil...
