481 KRK, Preamble (as stated in the Letter of Rights of the Child, the child needs special guarantees and care, including adequate legal protection, because of his or her physical and mental immaturity). Corporal punishment of children is synonymous with abuse and must stop. People need to be made aware of corporal punishment laws and, most importantly, we need to change our mindset and take a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of violence against children. This exclusion of corporal punishment in schools from state definitions of child abuse means that in states that allow corporal punishment in schools, the same conduct considered corporal punishment authorized by a teacher could be considered physical abuse if committed by a parent. In a case of corporal punishment injuries in New Mexico, a nurse who examined the student testified that if the injury had been sustained at home and not at school, she should have called the Child Protective Service (Garcia ex rel. Garcia v. Miera, 1987). This status quo leads to a paradoxical situation where teachers, as commissioned rapporteurs (Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, 1974), are required to report alleged abuse when a child enters school with an alleged injury; However, if the child returns from school with the same injury, a parent`s report about a teacher for abuse may not be investigated or prosecuted. A vivid illustration of this mystery comes from Kentucky, where a father took his 12-year-old daughter, who had a large stain on her buttocks following a school paddle, to the local child protection agency.

Agency staff conducted an investigation and concluded that physical violence occurred. The agency then tried to charge the director with criminal assault, but a grand jury did not indict the director. When the family filed an action in U.S. District Court, the court again ruled in favor of the client (C. A. ex rel G. A. v. Morgan Co.

Vol. of Educ., 2008). In the Committee`s view, corporal punishment is contrary to the fundamental guiding principle of international human rights law enshrined in the preambles to the Universal Declaration and the two Covenants, namely the dignity of the person.477 whether the use and prevalence of corporal punishment is concentrated in certain regions of those States. Figure 2 shows the prevalence of corporal punishment at the district level. Each district is coded according to the highest rate of corporal punishment at the school level in that county, or the percentage of all enrolled students who have been physically punished at least once. Overall, more counties in the 19 states where corporal punishment is legal did not use corporal punishment in the 2011-2012 school year than this one: 59% of counties in these states reported no use of corporal punishment (blue color in Figure 2). 513 OHCHR, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Declarations and Reservations Made Upon Ratification, Accession or Succession, United States of America, www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/ratification/docs/DeclarationsReservationsICCPR.pdf (accessed 8 August 2008), Reservation 3 (to which the United States will be bound by Article 7 to the extent that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment constitutes cruel treatment or punishment, and unusual that is prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution). The practice of corporal punishment of children continues unabated, regardless of its effectiveness in enforcing discipline. People want to believe the age-old saying of „spare the rod and spoil the child,“ when there is no evidence that battered and injured children grow up to be responsible citizens, nor are those who were spared by the cane and grew up in a loving and caring environment. A rod cannot replace conversations. There are a thousand ways to help children understand the difference between good and bad behavior. Physical abuse only hardens children and they hold a grudge against the disciplinary authority to punish them; The parents who allow it, and the institution for it to happen.

You may also look for an opportunity to settle scores and use violent retaliation. Sometimes their impressionable minds may accept it as the right path and they may become violent adults who believe in the power of violence. Both are false. In Turkey, corporal punishment is illegal, is considered assault,[79] and is punishable by imprisonment for a minimum of 1 year and not more than 3 years if none of the following special cases occur. [80] In November 1959, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which recognizes that the physical and mental immaturity of the child requires special safeguards and care, including adequate legal protection, before and after birth. 462 The United States was one of 78 members of the United Nations General Assembly at the time, which voted unanimously in favor of adopting the Declaration.463 Since then, almost all governments, including the United States, have continued to develop specific rights for children, including in the area of education. However, contrary to their explicit desire to protect the human rights of children, US states have not taken steps to reduce or eliminate the use of corporal punishment. Although the United States is a federal system in which considerable power over education rests with state and local officials, the federal government has the obligation and power to ensure compliance with human rights laws in its constituent states.502 Criminal law generally prohibits bodily harm and ordinary assault. But corporal punishment is by tradition and an implicit justification/defence of the common law. legally (R v Hopley 2F&F 202, 1860[91]) to such charges for parents who beat their children as part of „lawful correctness“ if the act is „mediocre and reasonable.“ The Children Act 2004[92] effectively contains a legal definition of „excessive“ by rejecting this justification for any punishment inflicting injury or effects equivalent to bodily harm or actual bodily harm (ABH) or for any act considered to be „cruelty to persons under sixteen years of age“ in breach of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. and was described in the implementation as the criminalization of „visible bruises“[93] and minor injuries (comparable to ordinary „non-serious“ bodily harm).

Implicitly lawful/defensible. At the time, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) issued a charging standard that illegally stated that the age of the victim could be considered an aggravating factor in deciding whether the alleged offence was an unjustifiable serious assault causing ABH rather than (implicitly) joint assault, falsely stating that any injury that is more than „temporary redness of the skin“ or „spots“. like ABH: It had no legal basis and was withdrawn in 2011. The standards now correctly require proof of „serious“ injuries and for which a „prison sentence significantly in excess of six months should be provided“[94] (since case law requires/requires that injuries „must undoubtedly be more than temporary and minor,“ which is now interpreted as „more than ordinary bodily harm“) to justify an indefensible criminal charge against ABH. [95] Little is known about corporal punishment in public schools in the United States thanks to data collected regularly by OCR. The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), formerly known as the Elementary and Secondary Schools Survey, is collected every few years by the OCR pursuant to Section 203(c)(1) of the Ministry of Education Organic Act of 1979. All schools and districts funded by the U.S. Department of Education must comply with requests for OCR survey data under several federal regulations (34 C.F.

R. § 100.6(b), 106.71, and 104.61, 2000; U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2015b). The data presented in this report comes from the CRDC for the 2011-2012 school year, a universal survey conducted by school administrators among the 95,088 public schools in the United States (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2014b). The data are not publicly available, but are available upon request from the OCR. We focused on schools in the 19 states that allow corporal punishment (N = 38,775 schools), but then excluded schools contained in hospitals, juvenile detention centers, prisons or treatment centers, as well as adult education schools and online programs. In our aggregated state-level analyses, we report data for a total of 37,624 schools in 5,461 districts. Our district-level analyses exclude the majority of charter schools as well as some specialized schools that are assigned „district identification numbers“ by OCR, although they do not operate as a full school district.2 As a result, district-level analyses focused on 4,460 school districts representing 36,942 schools. These racial differences in corporal punishment in district schools have led us to question whether racial inequality in corporal punishment reflects a greater likelihood that black children will attend schools that use corporal punishment. Table 4 compares the percentage of black and white children attending schools that use corporal punishment by state. While there is a racial difference, it is the opposite of what one might expect: white children are generally more likely than black children to attend a school that uses corporal punishment.

This is especially true in Kentucky, where whites are 7 times more likely to attend a school that uses corporal punishment than blacks, as well as Oklahoma (3 times more likely), Florida (2.5 times more likely), Missouri (2.2 times more likely) and Tennessee (2 times more likely).