[SoTrue1920]

Disagreement is good in that it helps you understand another person's perspective (and it helps you hone in on why you feel the way you do about a certain topic). Here's something I ran across in the Toronto Star today regarding bullying, child pornography, and protection of children. It's kind of long, but it's an interesting read :

"One cause of bullying, said a study summarized in the American Medical Association News Update several years ago, is spanking. Researchers followed more than 800 mothers in a longitudinal study. They found that children who were spanked, even once a week, even in otherwise loving and emotionally warm families, and despite any other social or economic factors, all showed an increase in anti-social behaviour, tendencies to cheat and lie, bullying, cruelty to others and disobedience at school.

That study doesn't stand alone. In a powerful recent book, Something To Cry About, An Argument Against Corporal Punishment of Children in Canada, author Dr. Susan Turner cites dozens of studies on the correlation between physical punishment of children and their levels of aggression in adulthood. The studies are virtually unanimous. Corporal punishment is a significant risk factor for bullying, alienation from family, poor school performance and adult violence.

In January of this year, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the right of teachers and parents to use "reasonable force" to "correct" their children's behaviour, in the words of Section 43 of the Criminal Code. Section 43 provides a defence for adults accused of assaulting children. Judges Stephen Goudge, Marvin Catzman and David Doherty all agreed that Section 43 strikes "a fair balance" between children's right to be protected and adults' rights to use force on children without fearing prosecution.

I'm astonished. As a society, we've now recognized that violence against schoolchildren is assault. It took us the better part of a century to establish that simple fact. It took decades and decades to show that a man has no right to hit his wife. We now call it assault, though it was once called "correction." And after all this, learned judges soberly sit on the bench and decree that violence against small, defenceless children — the deliberate infliction of pain by trusted adults — is "reasonable" and not an assault.

As Dr. Turner methodically and crisply establishes in her book, not a single rationale for hitting children can withstand clear, logical analysis, let alone moral, ethical or utilitarian considerations. Nor, in countries like Sweden and Italy where hitting children has become illegal, has there been an outbreak of arrests of parents who swatted their offspring. (That seems to be the guilty panic of the majority of Canadian parents, who constantly support Section 43 lest cops break down their doors and arrest them for spanking. As if.)

Instead, wherever corporal punishment has been outlawed, whole cultures are slowly changing to recognize the terrible, widespread harm of physical violence against children.

And the harm is reversible. A University of Minnesota study of 1,000 parents showed that children's levels of aggression and violence drop dramatically when their parents stop hitting and learn to discipline their children with attention, praise, love and clear standards of behaviour.

The rest of the article appears here .