Eulalee Thompson
This article will make some people angry or, at the very least, very uncomfortable. It's just been so amazing listening to talk radio over the past week or so, to some adults express their views on this revived, anachronistic national debate on corporal punishment. I wondered if dinosaurs had been unearthed to haunt us all over again.
In a way, this revived, antiquated discussion shouldn't be astonishing. In the 'collective unconscious' of this community (perhaps rooted in a violent British colonial slave past and an overpowering Christian dogma) is the view that children leave their mothers' womb as wicked and bad creatures. These terrible beasts, who by the way are seen as the 'property' of their parents, must have this wickedness beaten out of them; they must be beaten into obedience; remember the Bible says, 'spare the rod and spoil the child'.
Wooden hairbrush
And, just to show you how this kind of thinking has been internalised and persists in the society, I overheard one of these dinosaurs relating (in such a graphic way that I cringed) how she was beaten as a child on the buttocks with the flat, wooden part of a hairbrush. After this thrashing, her buttocks hurt and burned so much that she could not sit for at least 15 minutes.
But she told the radio audience that she was grateful to her parents for doing this because she was stubborn and that she is no worse off. No worse off than that what, I wondered. And, if these past beatings were no big deal then how come so many of these adults can remember and recount all of them in such great detail?
My brain can't distinguish shades of beating. Beating is beating. It doesn't matter much (at least to me) who is doing the beating and who is on the receiving end. If a man beats on his wife (or vice versa) or if any adult beats on another adult, it's appalling and a criminal offence. Then how come an adult (parent or teacher) beating on a child is labelled as corporal punishment and deemed more socially acceptable? Come on now, does that make any sense?
