Corporal Punishment In Australia

THESIS: The defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ needs to be abolished in court cases related to child abuse.

The corporal punishment of children is universally branded as “the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child’s behavior” (STRAUS, 1994). In Australia, corporal punishment of children in the home is currently legal, provided it is ‘reasonable’. According to Bourke, (1981), such circumstances would be determined in relation to the age of the child, the method of punishment, the child’s capacity for reasoning (i.e. whether the child is able to comprehend correction/discipline) and the degree of harm caused to the child. Punishment

Physical punishment is widely accepted to be a permissible act due to the current legislation recognizing that there may be circumstances for the use of ‘reasonable chastisement’. The physical injuries sustained as a result of corporal punishment are often differentiated by parents from what might be identified as physical abuse when it comes to considering its usage, since there is this distinction in ‘reasonableness’. It is argued that severe injuries only occur when disciplined, strategic corporal punishment becomes child abuse, and thus should not be scrutinized in the same manner. It is true that the distinction between corporal punishment and abuse is more than simply a natural progression of severity, as experts have explained, the two are qualitatively different acts and the parents that resort to abuse tend to share a distinctive set of attributes not present in most parents who use corporal punishment (Baumrind, Larzelere, & Cowan, 2002). It is true that of the large proportion of parents who use corporal punishment with their children, the majority never become physically abusive. A Scottish study demonstrates this. The researchers found that two important key points emerged when parents were asked about the last time they used it: “First, a smack on the bottom or on the hand, arm or leg is by far the most common form of physical chastisement, accounting for 96% of all incidents. Secondly, in almost 9 out of 10 cases, the child was smacked or hit [just] once” (Anderson, Murray, & Brownlie, 2002). It is alleged that corporal punishment is not harmful to children when used ‘suitably’ and