New Study in 88 Countries Links Spanking to Teen Violence
54 countries around the world ban corporate punishment – Bolivia, Brazil, Germany, Poland, Spain, South Sudan, Tunisia, Gabon, Mongolia, among others. The most recent country to adopt a ban was Nepal, earlier this year.
A new study published in the online journal BMJ Open alleges that there is a robust correlation between countries that ban corporal punishment, such as spanking, and a reduction in youth violence. The study looked at 400,000 young people from 88 countries, measuring the frequency with which they get into fights. Data from Georgia was not included in the study.
An article published by Illinois public radio explains, “Of the countries included in the study, 30 have passed laws fully banning physical punishment of children, both in schools and in homes. The rates of fighting among adolescents were substantially lower than in the 20 countries with no bans in place: by 69 percent for adolescent males and 42 percent less for females. The other 38 countries in the study — which include the United States, Canada, and the U.K. — have partial bans, in schools only. In those countries, adolescent females showed a 56 percent lower rate of physical fighting, with no change among males.”
The study’s lead author, Frank Elgar, an associate professor at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal, notes that his work does not prove causation. "It could be that bans come into place in countries that have already generally accepted that spanking is not the best discipline method," he said, and suggested there may be other cultural factors at play.
The association, however, holds even after controlling for differences in national wealth and homicide rates.
The Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment for Children publishes on their website information on every country and territory in the world regarding corporal punishment legislation. The organization states that, while Georgia does not have any laws explicitly banning corporal punishment in all settings, there is no legislative defense of the practice, either. Corporal punishment is illegal in all schools. It claims that “Georgia is committed to reforming its laws to prohibit corporal punishment in all settings,” noting that “Georgia expressed its commitment to prohibiting all corporal punishment in accepting clearly the recommendations to do so made during the Universal Periodic Review of Georgia in 2015. Georgia became a Pathfinder country with the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children in 2018.”
Much research has been conducted on spanking, revealing what can be lifelong negative consequences. Elizabeth Gershoff, a professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, says throughout 20 years of studying the effects of corporal punishment, “The findings were consistently negative.” Children who were spanked after a bad behavior, says Gershoff, were neither more compliant nor better behaved. In boys and girls, spanking was “linked to more aggression, more delinquent behavior, more mental health problems, worse relationships with parents, and putting the children at higher risk for physical abuse from their parents,” Gershoff explains.
UNICEF senior data specialist Claudia Cappa insists that “violence teaches violence,” saying that “a child exposed to violence at home is very likely to use violence against peers in school.” She explains that children logically relate physical punishment to solving conflict, and apply that logic later in life and in settings outside the home. Cappa wrote a 2017 UNICEF study called A Familiar Face: Violence in the Lives of Children and Adolescents, which cited the figure of “300 million children between the ages of 2 and 4 [worldwide] experienced physical punishment or verbal abuse from their parents of caregivers, and in some countries, children as young as 12 months old were subject to hitting.”
Cappa warns that a legislative prohibition is necessary but not sufficient. Bans must be complemented by programs to teach parents alternative discipline methods. "Alternative strategies exist and are more effective,” says Cappa. Gershoff suggests that parents and teachers model behavior they want to see in children. She also notes that positive behavior should be reinforced in children through praise.
By Samantha Guthrie