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BBS: Peachy Keeno Inn BBS
Date: 08-20-95 (12:39)             Number: 60509
From: TRAVIS BEARD                 Refer#: NONE 
 To: ALL                           Recvd: NO
Subj: Hentoff on child abuse         Conf: (162) F_CIVIL_LI
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Legalized child abuse
By Nat Hentoff
A police sergeant in upstate New York, having read some of my
reporting on corporal punishment in public schools around the country,
sent me a set of color photographs from a police lab. They were of his
son, a third-grader.
The boy had inadvertently yelled out when another student kicked him.
Having thereby violated the school rule against noisemaking in class, he
was paddled 12 times on the buttocks by the principal wielding a heavy
paddle. That afternoon, the same incorrigible boy tripped over a desk
and again made noise. The principal whacked the kid vigorously again.
His father took those photographs -- which disclosed, as he noted,
"raw flesh showing blood" -- to court. But his lawsuit against the
principal was dismissed. At the time, New York State law said that
public school educators could administer corporal punishment -- short of
"deadly force." Had his son died, the police sergeant would have had a
case.
Corporal punishment has finally been abolished in New York State, but
legalized beating of public school children remains in force in 24
states.
I have interviewed children and parents in a number of towns and
cities, and while the Supreme Court has refused to find corporal
punishment "cruel and unusual punishment" in even the most egregious
cases before it, teachers and principals do sometimes lose control. And
children sometimes are hospitalized.
The sovereign state of Alabama has now relieved  its teachers of any
fear of being sued for overenthusiastic punishment. This is the same
state that recently made it possible for tourists to see shackled
prisoners in chain gangs along the roads -- the only state to return to
the golden age of convict punishment.
The Alabama legislature has passed a punishment law giving teachers
who hit students immunity from civil and criminal liability -- provided
they whack the kids within the policy of their local school board (only
nine of the 121 school systems in Alabama do not allow paddling).
As for some of the results of those guidelines, Ann James -- past
president of the Alabama Parent Teacher Association -- told Debbie
Elliott of National Public Radio:
"There are parents who have come to me over the years with pictures of
their children's behinds that were black and blue. We feel they had been
excessively paddled and abused."
At the city pool in Orange Beach, Ala., a mother said on NPR: "What is
a kid going to say? `Well, if they can hit me and they can hurt me, then
I can go out and hurt and hit somebody else.'  All [Alabama] is doing is
feeding the biggest problem we have in the United States right now."
In those states that continue to nurture the old-fashioned discipline
of beating children, most of the victims are black, Latino, Chicano or
poor whites. Middle class parents might bring a lawsuit -- although they
won't be able to now in Alabama, at least against teachers.
Of all the parents I've talked with, I most vividly remember a woman
in Little Rock, Ark. Her son, an eighth-grader, had been in the hospital
for two days. He was talking in class, against the rules, and had been
taught a lesson he would not soon forget.
His mother was furious and frustrated. There was no point filing suit,
she had been told, because it would be tossed out of court. She spoke
with me on condition that I not use her name. She was afraid that
otherwise, reprisals would be taken against her son in his place of
democratic education.
I can still hear her indignant voice talking about "the man who hit my
boy." "Why, he took another boy and slammed him into the locker," she
said. I can't understand how they let people like this teach children.
"When my boy was in the fifth grade, he got up out of his seat. That's
all he did. They tied him to a chair with a rope. Then, when they
started hitting him, I told that sorry devil of a principal, `I don't
want anyone ever laying a hand on my child again.' He told me to shut my
mouth. Good lord, what a child needs is confidence in grown-ups, not to
fear them."
In its condemnation of corporal punishment, the American Bar
Association has pointed out that beating kids in school is "a form of
child abuse."
But the beat goes on. Nearly all European nations have ended corporal
punishment in their schools. Yet in 24 states in this advanced nation,
children are sometimes badly battered by adults who -- if they did that
as parents of those children -- would have the kids taken away from
them.
... Freedom and vomiting should never be taken for granted!
* Origin: The Blind Pig, Seattle WA (1:343/96.0)
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