Culture and Corporal Punishment

Corporal punishment of young children is becoming progressively less acceptable in the modern world. It is increasingly seen as both inhumane and an important source of the repetition of future family violence as the abused children become parents. An important step in further breaking this cycle of violence is to determine the effects of a high frequency of physical punishment on children. This determination requires a comparison between two social environments: one where corporal punishment is customarily frequent, the other where corporal punishment occurs rarely. From relatively observable and objective information in ethnographic descriptions of a world sample of diverse societies, 16 societies in which corporal punishment of young children occurred rarely were compared with 21 societies in which corporal punishment was very frequent.

Proximity of the father to his young children is rare or infrequent in most of the societies with very frequent corporal punishment. The father’s closeness is frequent in the majority of societies with rare occurrence of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment may actually be minimized by nearness of both parents to the children. Perhaps presence of the father decreases misbehavior by the children or inhibits punitiveness by the mother. (In our society, many mothers assign severe punishment to the father.)

Absence of the father is attributable to the customs of some societies with very frequent corporal punishment. The father may have multiple wives who live in separate dwellings. The mother may be visited by her husband seldom or never while she has a young child. Husbands may sleep in a men’s house rather than in the same dwelling as their wives and children. Fathers may pay more attention to their patrilineal or matrilineal relatives than to their children. Most societies with rare corporal punishment have monogamous marriage and bilateral descent, which emphasize the nuclear family rather than kinships with one side of the extended family.

While corporal punishment in most societies is applied equally rarely or equally frequently to young children of both sexes, more severe control over females is associated with very frequent corporal punishment. Sexual intercourse by unmarried girls is prohibited in most societies with very frequent corporal punishment but acceptable in most societies with rare corporal punishment. Four Moslem societies studied had very frequent corporal punishment.

In societies with very frequent corporal punishment of young children, assault and homicide by adults in the community occur more frequently and there is a prevalent belief in the “evil

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eye”—that malevolent individuals exercise destructive magical power against crops, livestock, or people. Detrimental behaviors and beliefs, therefore, are associated with very frequent corporal punishment.

Additional findings do not support frequent claims that parents are predominantly punitive in large nations and indulgent in small, independent tribes. They also do not support a claim by Lloyd deMause that infanticide and other types of child abuse are more frequent in small, independent tribes.

Overall, the findings indicate hope for the continued reduction of corporal punishment in contemporary society. Fathers are more involved with their young children, women and girls enjoy more freedom, and rates of violent crimes are declining, and magical beliefs are weakening. These recent changes may be causes, and also consequences, of less frequent corporal punishment of young children.

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