In Manhattan in 1874, the neighbors of ten-year-old Mary Ellen McCormack, an orphan being raised by an adoptive mother and her second husband, noticed suspicious cuts and bruises on the girl’s body.173 They reported her to the Department of Public Charities and Correction, which administered the city’s jails, poorhouses, orphanages, and insane asylums. Since there were no laws that specifically protected children, the caseworker contacted the American Society for the Protection of Animals. The society’s founder saw an analogy between the plight of the girl and the plight of the horses he rescued from violent stable owners. He engaged a lawyer who presented a creative interpretation of habeas corpus to the New York State Supreme Court and petitioned to have her removed from her home. The girl calmly testified:Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip—a rawhide. I have now on my head two black-and-blue marks which were made by Mamma with the whip, and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in Mamma’s hand.... I never dared speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.
The New York Times reprinted the testimony in an article entitled “Inhumane Treatment of a Little Waif,” and the girl was removed from the home and eventually adopted by her caseworker. Her lawyer set up the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first protective agency for children anywhere in the world. Together with other agencies founded in its wake, it set up shelters for battered children and lobbied for laws that punished their abusive parents. Similarly, in England the first legal case to protect a child against an abusive parent was taken up by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and out of it grew the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Though the rollover of the 19th century saw an acceleration in the valuation of children in the West, it was neither an abrupt transition nor a one-shot advance. Expressions of love of children, of grief at their loss, and of dismay at their mistreatment can be found in every period of European history and in every culture.174 Even many of the parents who treated their children cruelly were often laboring under superstitions that led them to think they were acting in the child’s best interests. And as with many declines in violence, it’s hard to disentangle all the changes that were happening at once—enlightened ideas, increasing prosperity, reformed laws, changing norms.
But whatever the causes were, they did not stop in the 1930s. Benjamin Spock’s perennial bestseller Baby and Child Care was considered radical in 1946 because it discouraged mothers from spanking their children, stinting on affection, and regimenting their routines. Though the indulgence of postwar parents was a novelty at the time (widely and spuriously blamed for the excesses of the baby boomers), it was by no means a high-water mark. When the boomers became parents, they were even more solicitous of their children. Locke, Rousseau, and the 19th-century reformers had set in motion an escalator of gentleness in the treatment of children, and in recent decades its rate of ascent has accelerated.
Since 1950, people have become increasingly loath to allow children to become the victims of any kind of violence. The violence people can most easily control, of course, is the violence they inflict themselves, namely by spanking, smacking, slapping, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other forms of corporal punishment. Elite opinion on corporal punishment changed dramatically during the 20th century. Other than in fundamentalist Christian groups, it’s rare today to hear people say that sparing the rod will spoil the child. Scenes of fathers with belts, mothers with hairbrushes, and teary children tying pillows to their bruised behinds are no longer common in family entertainment.
At least since Dr. Spock, child-care gurus have increasingly advised against spanking.175 Today every pediatric and psychological association opposes the practice, though not always in language as clear as the title of a recent article by Murray Straus: “Children Should Never, Ever, Be Spanked No Matter What the Circumstances.”176 The expert opinion recommends against spanking for three reasons. One is that spanking has harmful side effects down the line, including aggression, delinquency, a deficit in empathy, and depression. The cause-and-effect theory, in which spanking teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems, is debatable. Equally likely explanations for the correlation between spanking and violence are that innately violent parents have innately violent children, and that cultures and neighborhoods that tolerate spanking also tolerate other kinds of violence.177 The second reason not to spank a child is that spanking is not particularly effective in reducing misbehavior compared to explaining the infraction to the child and using nonviolent measures like scolding and time-outs. Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong, and if the only reason they have to behave is to avoid these penalties, then as soon as Mom’s and Dad’s backs are turned they can be as naughty as they like. But perhaps the most compelling reason to avoid spanking is symbolic. Here is Straus’s third reason why children should never, ever be spanked: “Spanking contradicts the ideal of nonviolence in the family and society.”
Have parents been listening to the experts, or perhaps coming to similar conclusions on their own? Public opinion polls sometimes ask people whether they agree with statements like “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking” or “There are certain circumstances when it is all right to smack a child.” The level of agreement depends on the wording of the question, but in every poll in which the same question has been asked in different years, the trend is downward. Figure 7–17 shows the trends since 1954 from three American datasets, together with surveys from Sweden and New Zealand. Before the early 1980s, around 90 percent of respondents in the English-speaking countries approved of spanking. In less than a generation, the percentage had fallen in some polls to just more than half. The levels of approval depend on the country and region: Swedes approve of spanking far less than do Americans or Kiwis, and Americans themselves are diverse, as we would expect from the southern culture of honor.178 In a 2005 survey, spanking approval rates ranged from around 55 percent in northern blue states (those that tend to vote for Democrats), like Massachusetts and Vermont, to more than 85 percent in southern red states (those that tend to vote for Republicans), like Alabama and Arkansas.179 Across the fifty states, the rate of approval of spanking tracks the homicide rate (the two measures show a correlation of 0.52 on a scale from -1 to 1), which could mean that spanked children grow up to be killers, but more likely that subcultures that encourage the spanking of children also encourage the violent defense of honor among adults.180 But every region showed a decline, so that by 2006 the southern states disapproved of spanking in the same proportion that the north-central and mid-Atlantic states did in 1986.181
FIGURE 7–17. Approval of spanking in the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand, 1954–2008
Sources: Gallup/ABC: Gallup, 1999; ABC News, 2002. Straus: Straus, 2001, p. 206. General Social Survey: http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/, weighted means. New Zealand: Carswell, 2001. Sweden: Straus, 2009.
What about actual behavior? Many parents will still slap a toddler’s hand if the child reaches for a forbidden object, but in the second half of the 20th century every other kind of corporal punishment declined. In the 1930s American parents spanked their children more than 3 times a month, or more than 30 times a year. By 1975 the figure had fallen to 10 times a year and by 1985 to around 7.182 Even steeper declines were seen in Europe.183 In the 1950s, 94 percent of Swedes spanked their children, and 33 percent did so every day; by 1995, the figures had plunged to 33 and 4 percent. By 1992, German parents had come a long way from their great-grandparents who had placed their grandparents on hot stoves and tied them to bedposts. But 81 percent still slapped their children on the face, 41 percent spanked them with a stick, and 31 percent beat them to the point of bruising. By 2002, these figures had sunk to 14 percent, 5 percent, and 3 percent.
There remains a lot of vari
ation among countries today. No more than 5 percent of college students in Israel, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden recall being hit as a teenager, but more than a quarter of the students in Tanzania and South Africa do.184 In general, wealthier countries spank their children less, with the exception of developed Asian nations like Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The international contrast is replicated among ethnic groups in the United States, where African Americans and Asians spank more than whites.185 But the level of approval of spanking has declined in all three groups.186
In 1979 the government of Sweden outlawed spanking altogether.187 The other Scandinavian countries soon joined it, followed by several countries of Western Europe. The United Nations and the European Union have called on all their member nations to abolish spanking. Several countries have launched public awareness campaigns against the practice, and twenty-four have now made it illegal.
The prohibition of spanking represents a stunning change from millennia in which parents were considered to own their children, and the way they treated them was considered no one else’s business. But it is consistent with other intrusions of the state into the family, such as compulsory schooling, mandatory vaccination, the removal of children from abusive homes, the imposition of lifesaving medical care over the objections of religious parents, and the prohibition of female genital cutting by communities of Muslim immigrants in European countries. In one frame of mind, this meddling is a totalitarian imposition of state power into the intimate sphere of the family. But in another, it is part of the historical current toward a recognition of the autonomy of individuals. Children are people, and like adults they have a right to life and limb (and genitalia) that is secured by the social contract that empowers the state. The fact that other individuals—their parents—stake a claim of ownership over them cannot negate that right.
American sentiments tend to weight family over government, and currently no American state prohibits corporal punishment of children by their parents. But when it comes to corporal punishment of children by the government, namely in schools, the United States has been turning away from this form ofof violence. Even in red states, where three-quarters of the people approve of spanking by parents, only 30 percent approve of paddling in schools, and in the blue states the approval rate is less than half that.188 And since the 1950s the level of approval of corporal punishment in schools has been in decline (figure 7–18). The growing disapproval has been translated into legislation. Figure 7–19 shows the shrinking proportion of American states that still allow corporal punishment in schools.
FIGURE 7–18. Approval of corporal punishment in schools in the United States, 1954–2002
Sources: Data for 1954–94 from Gallup, 1999; data for 2002 from ABC News, 2002.
FIGURE 7–19. American states allowing corporal punishment in schools, 1954–2010
Source: Data from Leiter, 2007.
The trend is even more marked in the international arena, where corporal punishment in schools is now seen as a violation of human rights, like other forms of extrajudicial government violence. It has been condemned by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Human Rights Committee, and the UN Committee Against Torture, and has been banned by 106 countries, more than half of the world’s total.189
Though a majority of Americans still endorse corporal punishment by parents, they draw an increasingly sharp line between mild violence they consider discipline, such as spanking and slapping, and severe violence they consider abuse, such as punching, kicking, whipping, beating, and terrorizing (for example, threatening a child with a knife or gun, or dangling it over a ledge). In his surveys of domestic violence, Straus gave respondents a checklist that included punishments that are now considered abusive. He found that the number of parents admitting to them almost halved between 1975 and 1992, from 20 percent of mothers to a bit more than 10 percent.190
A problem in self-reports of violence by perpetrators (as opposed to self-reports by victims) is that a positive response is a confession to a wrongdoing. An apparent decline in parents beating their children may really be a decline in parents owning up to it. At one time a mother who left bruises on her child might consider it within the range of acceptable discipline. But starting in the 1980s, a growing number of opinion leaders, celebrities, and writers of television dramas began to call attention to child abuse, often by portraying abusive parents as reprehensible ogres or grown-up children as permanently scarred. In the wake of this current, a parent who bruised a child in anger might keep her mouth shut when the surveyor called. We do know that child abuse had become more of a stigma in this interval. In 1976, when people were asked, “Is child abuse a serious problem in this country?” 10 percent said yes; when the same question was asked in 1985 and 1999, 90 percent said yes.191 Straus argued that the downward trend in his violence survey captured both a decline in the acceptance of abuse and a decline in actual abuse; even if much of the decline was in acceptance, he added, that would be something to celebrate. A decreasing tolerance of child abuse led to an expansion in the number of abuse hotlines and child protection officers, and to an expanded mandate among police, social workers, school counselors, and volunteers to look for signs of abuse and take steps that would lead to abusers being punished or counseled and to children being removed from the worst homes.
Have the changes in norms and institutions done any good? The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System was set up to aggregate data on substantiated cases of child abuse from child protection agencies around the country. The psychologist Lisa Jones and the sociologist David Finkelhor have plotted their data over time and shown that from 1990 to 2007 the rate of physical abuse of children fell by half (figure 7–20).
FIGURE 7–20. Child abuse in the United States, 1990–2007
Sources: Data from Jones & Finkelhor, 2007; see also Finkelhor & Jones, 2006.
Jones and Finkelhor also showed that during this time the rate of sexual abuse, and the incidence of violent crimes against children such as assault, robbery, and rape, also fell by a third to two-thirds. They corroborated the declining numbers with sanity checks such as victimization surveys, homicide data, offender confessions, and rates of sexually transmitted diseases, all of which are in decline. In fact over the past two decades the lives of children and adolescents improved in just about every way you can measure. They were also less likely to run away, to get pregnant, to get into trouble with the law, and to kill themselves. England and Wales have also enjoyed a decline in violence against children: a recent report has shown that since the 1970s, the rate of violent deaths of children fell by almost 40 percent.192
The decline of child abuse in the 1990s coincided in part with the decline of adult homicide, and its causes are just as hard to pinpoint. Finkelhor and Jones examined the usual suspects. Demography, capital punishment, crack cocaine, guns, abortion, and incarceration can’t explain the decline. The prosperity of the 1990s can explain it a little, but can’t account for the decline in sexual abuse, nor a second decline of physical abuse in the 2000s, when the economy was in the tank. The hiring of more police and interveners from social service agencies probably helped, and Finkelhor and Jones speculate that another exogenous factor may have made a difference. The early 1990s was the era of Prozac Nation and Running on Ritalin. The massive expansion in the prescription of medication for depression and attention deficit disorder may have lifted many parents out of depression and helped many children control their impulses. Finkelhor and Jones also pointed to nebulous but potentially potent changes in cultural norms. The 1990s, as we saw in chapter 3, hosted a civilizing offensive that reversed some of the licentiousness of the 1960s and made all forms of violence increasingly repugnant. And the Oprahfication of America applied a major stigma to domestic violence, while destigmatizing—indeed beatifying—the victims who brought it to light.
Another kind of violence that torments many children is the violence perpetrated against them by other children. Bull
ying has probably been around for as long as children have been around, because children, like many juvenile primates, strive for dominance in their social circle by demonstrating their mettle and strength. Many childhood memoirs include tales of cruelty at the hands of other children, and the knuckle-dragging bully is a staple of popular culture. The rogues’ gallery includes Butch and Woim in Our Gang, Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future trilogy, Nelson Muntz in The Simpsons, and Moe in Calvin and Hobbes (figure 7–21).
Until recently, adults had written off bullying as one of the trials of childhood. “Boys will be boys,” they said, figuring that an ability to deal with intimidation in childhood was essential training for the ability to deal with it in adulthood. The victims, for their part, had nowhere to turn, because complaining to a teacher or parent would brand them as snitches and pantywaists and make their lives more hellish than ever.
But in another of those historical gestalt shifts in which a category of violence flips from inevitable to intolerable, bullying has been targeted for elimination. The movement emerged from the ball of confusion surrounding the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, as the media amplified one another’s rumors about the causes—Goth culture, jocks, antidepressants, video games, Internet use, violent movies, the rock singer Marilyn Manson—and one of them was bullying. As it turned out, the two assassins were not, as the media endlessly repeated, Goths who had been picked on by jocks.193 But a popular understanding took hold that the massacre was an act of revenge, and childhood professionals parlayed the urban legend into a campaign against bullying. Fortunately, the theory—bully victim today, cafeteria sniper tomorrow—coexisted with more respectable rationales, such as that victims of bullies suffer from depression, impaired performance in school, and an elevated risk of suicide.194 Currently forty-four states have laws that prohibit bullying in school, and many have mandatory curricula that denounce bullying, encourage empathy, and instruct children in how to resolve their conflicts constructively.195 Organizations of pediatricians and child psychologists have issued statements calling for prevention efforts, and magazines, television programs, the Oprah Winfrey empire, and even the president of the United States have targeted it as well. 196 In another decade, the facetious treatment of bullying in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon may become as offensive as the spank-the-wife coffee ads from the 1950s are to us today.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 65
