Epub 2021 May 3. Explains how Federal and State laws define physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. Associations between corporal punishment and a number of lifetime aggression indicators were examined in this study after efforts to control the potential influence of various forms of co-occurring maltreatment (parental physical abuse, childhood sexual abuse, sibling abuse, peer bullying, and observed parental violence). Just over half of state definitions contain only broad language and fail to provide specific examples of injuries or acts constituting physical abuse or to elaborate otherwise on the meaning of physical harm or injury. This, in turn, should result in more consistent case outcomes as well as fewer false-positive and false-negative findings of maltreatment. Second, although legal reform is sometimes warranted in the face of the status quo, we do not believe that such confrontation is necessary here. Dimensional and categorical corporal punishment scores were associated significantly with half of the criterion measures. This knowledge, and the corresponding legal judgment of whether an assault constitutes physical abuse, has evolved over time. Unlike the necessity standard, the reasonableness standard permits the fact-finder to defer to parents judgment so long as it is within the range of acceptable decisions. The model corporal-punishment provision concluding this section demonstrates how the recommendations can work together to provide the relevant legal actors with a systematic approach to drawing the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse that reconciles parental-autonomy norms and scientific evidence. What Is Considered Child Abuse? Serious harm, which is the criterion for abuse in most jurisdictions, includes not only immediately obvious physical injury but also internal brain damage and long-term psychological and cognitive disability. Studies suggest that parents who used corporal punishment are at heightened risk of perpetrating severe maltreatment. Provides a guide for parents on when parental discipline crosses the line and is considered child abuse. This single rule, in turn, would potentially reduce the number of incidents in which children were injured in the disciplinary setting and, correspondingly, the number of interventions by the state in the family. Nonetheless, the premise of this article is that the distinction between permissible and impermissible corporal punishment is too important to leave to the only loosely guided discretion afforded by modern child-abuse definitions. 2023 Mar 13;10(3):545. doi: 10.3390/children10030545. These provisions typically use the term reasonable to describe legally acceptable corporal punishment, although some employ the term excessive to describe corporal punishment that has crossed the line of acceptability. Jane Costello E, et al. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect. Some of the following recommendations reflect existing best practices in statutory language and court or CPS practice. Because it is beyond the scope of this article to consider how children and parents are treated once maltreatment has been found, we do not discuss actors such as therapists and family counselors, who are also important but who are involved only after this point. This site needs JavaScript to work properly. Prevalence, Societal Causes, and Trends in Corporal Punishment by Parents in World Perspective. Legislators and elected judges operating in a legal context where definitions already exist are likely to be better off if they leave things alone; the alternative, at least politically, is unattractive: entering the culture war that inevitably would result from efforts to codify different rules that respectively privilege and de-privilege particular groups parenting norms. The risk of being physically punished is similar for boys and girls, and for children from wealthy and poor households. Formally establishing the requirement that discipline be warranted remains essential, however, to addressing those infrequent instances when parents do act out of malice or a lack of caring, as well as those circumstances in which a child or category of children cannot benefit from and may even be significantly harmed by the disciplinary effort. Cal. Until recently, CPS decisionmaking was relatively unconstrained, resulting in a landscape where social workers personal orientations influenced results.66 In jurisdictions following this approach, a social worker or agency holding particularly strong views (one way or the other) on the moral or religious foundations for corporal punishment or on the relevance of any emotional or developmental impacts, might render decisions about the reasonableness of individual instances of corporal punishment (at least in part) according to those views. On the childs end, parental corporal-punishment behaviors are relatively likely to lead to functional impairment if the child experiences fundamental attachment insecurity (indicated by overdependence, avoidance, or dissociative behaviors), if the child indicates a strong fear of being alone with the parent, or if the child communicates feeling hated or rejected by the parent. But we encourage serious consideration of the question, and in particular, a focus on the different implications of a decision to base normativeness on the views of the broader community in which the family lives or on those of the familys particular communitythe immediate or extended family, including its affiliations, religious and otherwise. Larzelere Robert E, et al. Many states have exceptions for corporal punishment written into theirchild abuse laws. Empirical knowledge about changes in social norms and parenting practices is becoming more readily available and should be communicated to practitioners, lawyers, and judges regularly. Spare the Kids: Because Disciplining Children Doesn't Have to Hurt. Early Physical Abuse and Later Violent Delinquency: A Prospective Longitudinal Study. WebCorporal punishment (CP) is a form of discipline often de- fined as the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the In the end, the decision whether a parents behavior constitutes physical abuse may be best construed as a judgment by a scientifically informed expert. Barlow KM, Thomas E, Minns RA. The article proceeds as follows: Part II describes what is known about how the relevant institutional actorslegislatures, CPS, and courtscurrently find and define the line between reasonable and unlawful corporal punishment.15 Part III separately describes the parental-autonomy norms and scientific knowledge that currently compete for primacy in the discourse about corporal punishment and, as far as we can tell, largely contribute to decisions about the lawfulness of particular incidents on the ground. Part IV begins with an argument for definitional and methodological changes that reflects both parental-autonomy norms and scientific knowledge and follows with specific suggestions for policy reform. Duhaime A, et al. Like the long-term follow-ups of children found by CPS to have been maltreated, these studies also reveal that physically maltreated children are likely to suffer numerous adverse outcomes, including being arrested for violent as well as nonviolent offenses, dropping out of school, becoming a teenage parent, and being fired from employment.188 These outcomes hold across cultural groups and family contexts, suggesting a fairly universal adverse impact of the experience of physical abuse.189. Section 2919 is part of Ohios penal code. SBS is now well-accepted by courts as a medical diagnosis,165 and shaking a baby is increasingly litigated as physical abuse in the juvenile and criminal courts.166 The history of SBS is important for corporal-punishment cases generally because it establishes the role of scientific evidence in the identification of parental behavior (sometimes even normative parental behavior) as abuse. Physical punishment elicits intense and toxic negative affects: fear, distress, anger, shame, and disgust. Specifically, some courts consider whether the disciplinary act was rendered necessary by the childs actions.115 This approach requires courts to evaluate the nature and gravity of the childs behavior and the parents attempts to address the behavior without resorting to physical discipline.116 The childs age and developmental stage should also be relevant to this inquiry because punishment is pointless (and only potentially harmful) if the child is unable to appreciate its intended lesson. McKinley Jesse. Appellate courts have authority to review trial-court decisions. J Pediatr Health Care. We promote this standard to ensure that the state has the authority to intervene in the family in the face of good evidence that a child has suffered or risks suffering important disabilities, and to restrict state authority to intervene merely to mediate suboptimal conditions. Parents sometimes defend their corporal-punishment practices based on the family norm they experienced growing up, even in the face of a contemporary societal prohibition.221 Defining a parental practice as reasonable based on cultural normativeness is complicated by these varying norms. First, we do not want to be left with definitions so fine that they disallow necessary protective interventions based in different (nonnormative) or unprecedented and harmful parenting practices. Future functional impairment is (in all contexts) an estimate that has a probability attached to it, for example: highly likely, somewhat likely, unlikely to be impaired in a domain such as academic, mental health, or daily living. The three legal institutions responsible for where and how the states draw the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse are the state legislatures, which announce and define allowances and prohibitions in the first instance; CPS agencies and professionals, also known as departments of social services or DSS, which administer the legislative mandates and thus most directly engage families and children; and the courts, which are charged with interpreting legislation in the last instance, and which thus act as a check on decisions made by CPS. State Intervention on Behalf of Neglected Children: A Search for Realistic Standards. Second, society continues to support parents right to use corporal punishment, ensuring that normative disciplinediscipline that meets the reasonableness standardgenerally will not cause functional impairment. At least some case workers appear to be using a combination of valid evidence, intuition, or presumed knowledge about the nonphysical sequelae of physical injuries. The more elaborate the administrative constraints, the less likely it is that divergent norms, training, and ideology will influence the decision. One mother told a child-services caseworker that she used a wooden spoon to discipline her child because she believed it was wrong to hit with the hand, which should represent love. In examining the trends in For example, the Connecticut Court of Appeals recognized that a criminal statute granting parents a privilege to use reasonable physical force to correct their child demonstrate[d] the public recognition of the parental right to punish children for their own welfare and thus expressed the states policy of allowing reasonable corporal punishment. Lovan C. v. Dept of Children and Families, 860 A.2d 1283, 1288 (Conn. App. Other examples of punishment may include forcing a teenager to hold a sign that says, "I steal from stores," or calling a child names. Relatedly, this standard serves to assure, to the extent possible, that the publics wisdom regarding the normative use of corporal punishment is balanced with medical and scientific knowledge of harm to the child. An Examination of Parental Discipline as a Defense of Justification: Its Time for a Kindlier, Gentler Approach. Our interviews were designed to establish the degree and nature of the discretion CPS professionals have as they evaluate cases involving parental claims of reasonable corporal punishment. Of course, regardless of the normativeness of the practice, abuse would be found on evidence of functional impairment. Babies who survive the experience with none of these consequences may still suffer cerebral palsy or mental retardation, effects that may not become evident until after age six.159 One influential study determined that seventy-two percent of known victims suffer permanent neuro-developmental abnormalities or death.160, The anatomy and long-term consequences of internal head injury due to shaking have been discovered only over the past twenty-five years. The Evidence Base for Shaken Baby Syndrome: Meaning of Signature Must be Made Explicit. For example, North Carolinas CPS agencies employ a decision tree that requires classifying as neglect by inappropriate discipline any instance of corporal punishment that transgresses the agencies reasonableness criteria but that does not meet its abuse standards.36, Statutory definitions of physical abuse appearing in state family- or juvenile-court codes commonly except reasonable measures of physical discipline administered by parents.37 This exception reflects the longstanding common-law privilege of discipline, which provides that [a] parent is privileged to apply such reasonable force or to impose such reasonable confinement upon his child as he reasonably believes to be necessary for its proper control, training, or education.38, Twenty-one states, along with the District of Columbia, except reasonable physical discipline from their statutory definitions of physical abuse.
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