Is Spanking an Acceptable Form of Discipline?

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John Rosemond says that calling corporal punishment violence is “rhetoric.” You cannot strike your spouse, your neighbor, or even your neighbor’s dog. That’s not “rhetoric.” That is considered violence AND illegal. John Rosemond claims that children are well-protected by the law. Children who are injured in corporal punishment actions by their parents are not well protected by the law. Parents use the “reasonable corporal punishment” defense to escape punishment for injuring children and courts often let go unpunished extensive bruising lasting weeks administered with “rods”, whips, electric cords, and belts.

Rosemond touts Robert Larzelere and his studies of outcomes of the spanking ban in Sweden. Larzelere who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater also taught at the Bible College of Los Angeles (now Biola) for several years and published in Biola’s Journal of Psychology and Theology which requires all papers be “consistent with an evangelical position.” He is unlikely to be the impartial researcher John Rosemond claims. Larzelere studied the Swedish anti-spanking law and said that child abuse increased in the ten years after implementation. He concluded that the ban is a failure. He confuses child abuse reports with actual child abuse rates. In our own country, we had huge increases in child abuse reports when child abuse laws were passed in this country in the late l970’s. That doesn’t mean there was more child abuse. It means more people began reporting it.

In looking at child deaths from abuse, even John Rosemond and his favorite researcher Robert Larzelere would have to agree that U.S. rates are huge proportionately when compared to countries with bans where child deaths from physical abuse are almost unheard of. Physical punishment is a risk factor for abuse and death and every day we see examples of failures of law to protect children from harm.