three elements that distinguishes physical abuse from corporal punishment

Global perspective on corporal punishment and its effects on 7B-101(1)(a) (West 2004 & Supp. What Is Considered Child Abuse? This is the concept of the family as a village within a town, within a county, within a state, within the country; the village being primarily and in the first instance responsible for bringing up the young to become well-adjusted, productive individuals and citizens.136 Parental autonomy is also said to be good for society because children need to be raised by some adult(s), and neither the state itself nor any other individual or group of adults can replace parents as first best caretakers,137 and because societys interest in the perpetuation of heterogenic democracy is best fulfilled when an ideologically diverse group of individuals raises the children.138 Parental autonomy is viewed as being good for parents because it honors the natural bonds of affection that tie them to their children and also because it compensates them for taking on the responsibilities of parenting.139 Finally, parental autonomy is viewed as being good for children because, among the adults and institutions that might be imagined as caregivers, parents, guided by their natural bonds of affection, are most likely to take the best care of their own children and to do the best job raising them to be successful adults.140 That aspect of parental autonomy that sees the family as sovereign territory is specifically viewed as being good for children because, when parent and child are bonded, interference by outsiders to the relationship harms their emotional and developmental well-being.141, The theories that support parental autonomy have changed significantly over time. David and Anne Delaplane very eloquently discuss the religious and spiritual dimensions of child abuse and neglect in their articleVictims of Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Elder Abuse, Rape, Robbery, Assault, and Violent Death, A Manual for Clergy and Congregations, Special Edition for Military Chaplains, Section I: Child Abuse and Neglect.10Sections of their article are excerpted here. Child Welfare Information Gateway is a service of the, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Philosophy and Key Elements of Family-Centered Practice, Family-Centered Practice Across the Service Continuum, Creating a Family-Centered Agency Culture, Risk Factors That Contribute to Child Abuse and Neglect, People Who Engage in Child Abuse or Neglect, Overview: Preventing Child Abuse & Neglect, Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Programs, Public Awareness & Creating Supportive Communities, Developing & Sustaining Prevention Programs, Evidence-Based Practice for Child Abuse Prevention, Introduction to Responding to Child Abuse & Neglect, Differential Response in Child Protective Services, Responding to Child Maltreatment Near Fatalities and Fatalities, Trauma-Informed Practice in Child Welfare, Collaborative Responses to Child Abuse & Neglect, Supporting Families With Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders, Introduction to Family Support and Preservation, In-Home Services Involved With Child Protection, Resources for Managers of Family Support and Preservation Services, Transition to Adulthood and Independent Living, Overview: Achieving & Maintaining Permanency, Recruiting and Retaining Resource Families, Permanency for Specific Youth Populations, Working With Children, Youth, and Families in Permanency Planning, Working With Children, Youth, and Families After Permanency, Resources for Administrators and Managers About Permanency, Children's Bureau Adoption Call to Action, Adoption and Guardianship Assistance by State, For Adoption Program Managers & Administrators, For Expectant Parents Considering Adoption and Birth Parents, Administering & Managing Child Welfare Agencies & Programs, Evaluating Program and Practice Effectiveness, ndice de Ttulos en Espaol (Spanish Title Index), National Foster Care & Adoption Directory, Child Welfare Information Gateway Podcast Series. 2151.031(D). Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 40103 (1923) (discussing the downsides of alternative child-rearing models); Davis et al.. Lehr v. Robertson, 463 U.S. 248, 257 (1983) ([T]he Court has emphasized the paramount interest in the welfare of children and has noted that the rights of parents are a counterpart of the responsibilities they have assumed.); Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 602 (1979) (Parents generally, have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare [their children] for additional obligations.) (quoting Pierce v. Socy of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925)); Bartlett Katharine T. Re-Expressing Parenthood. The only question in these cases, then, is whether the force used was reasonable. WebAnalyses focused on three hypotheses: 1) The odds of experiencing childhood physical abuse would be higher among respondents reporting frequent corporal punishment Nonetheless, the premise of this article is that the distinction between permissible and impermissible corporal punishment is too important to leave to the only loosely guided discretion afforded by modern child-abuse definitions. WebOne distinction is that physical abuse results in nonaccidental physical injury to the child, while corporal punishment may cause temporary discomfort, but should not result in Corporal punishment encompasses all types of physical punishment, including spanking, slapping, pinching, pulling, twisting, and hitting with an object. It also may include forcing a child to consume unpleasant substances such as soap, hot sauce, or hot pepper. Ark. King AR, Kuhn SK, Strege C, Russell TD, Kolander T. Child Abuse Negl. For example, New York explicitly includes excessive corporal punishment within its statutory-neglect definition.33 Thus, it defines an abused child as one who suffers physical injury by other than accidental means which causes or creates a substantial risk of death, or serious or protracted disfigurement, or protracted impairment of physical or emotional health or protracted loss or impairment of the function of bodily organ.34 And it classifies as neglected a child whose physical condition has been impaired or harmed, but not injured seriously enough to create a substantial risk of death or protracted disfigurement or impairment.35 Other states adopting this approach have done so either informally or by administrative regulation. Meyer David D. The Constitutionalization of Family Law. In contrast, basing the normativeness finding on the parents particular community would assure that the finding is consistent with the childs point of viewand thus a better predictor of functional impairmentbut only so long as the child is too young to be or does not choose to be a member of the broader community and a beneficiary of its different norms. Deater-Deckard Kirby, Dodge Kenneth A. Externalizing Behavior Problems and Discipline Revisited: Nonlinear Effects and Variation by Culture, Context, and Gender. This knowledge, and the corresponding legal judgment of whether an assault constitutes physical abuse, has evolved over time. Although state legislatures are responsible for defining maltreatment in the first instance, the law on the ground is mostly set by the CPS professionals charged with investigating and supervising the investigation of maltreatment reports.47 Specifically, CPS professionals are responsible for determining whether particular factual situations described in the reports qualify as abuse or neglect, or are appropriately classified as reasonable corporal punishment.48 The vagueness inherent in most statutory definitionsincluding specifically in disciplinary exemptions that, without more, permit reasonable and disallow excessive corporal punishmentassures that, absent additional constraints, individual CPS professionals and departments have quite a lot of discretion as to the methodology they use to do this triage and as to where they ultimately draw the line between reasonable and unlawful corporal punishment. At the same time, we suggest that these costs are worth bearing if they can fix the problems inherent in the current process, specifically its tendency to produce inconsistent and erroneous outcomes. Although flexibility is certainly a valid concern, an important ancillary effect is that this ill-defined standard abdicates to the relevant legal actorsparents, reporters, CPS professionals, and the courtsthe job of defining maltreatment, and thus also the boundaries of reasonable corporal punishment. Appellate court judges in particular seem to be inclined toward privileging parents rights above harm to the child, as they are more likely, certainly more so than CPS professionals, to interpret a statutory requirement of physical injury or serious physical injury to require egregious harm or damage to the child. Underlying mechanisms for racial disparities in parent-child physical and psychological aggression and child abuse risk. Disentangling Disability From Clinical Significance. The corporal punishment subscale consisted of 3 items and included questions such as "His parents should slap him when he has done something wrong." In the process, we hope that it will dissolve some of the long-standing conceptual and communications impasses among the various affected disciplines. All United States jurisdictions have statutory definitions of child abuse consistent with the medical model of child abuse, which focuses specifically on the immediate and short-term physical effects of abuse on the child.16 Child-abuse definitions typically appear in both the criminal and civil sections of a states statutory code. There are few differences in prevalence of corporal punishment by sex or age, although in some places boys and younger children are more at risk. WebThe resident has the right to be free from abuse, neglect, misappropriation of resident property, and exploitation as defined in this subpart. Many states have exceptions for corporal punishment written into theirchild abuse laws. [7] Since Blackstones time, the parental discipline privilege has condoned parental assault on children in the name of discipline. This includes but is not limited to freedom from corporal punishment, involuntary seclusion and any physical or chemical restraint not required to treat the resident's medical symptoms. The Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth Functional Impairment and Serious Emotional Disturbance. Careers. One mother told a child-services caseworker that she used a wooden spoon to discipline her child because she believed it was wrong to hit with the hand, which should represent love. For example, some jurisdictions with both extensive non-conforming immigrant communities and the political will and resources to work to reconcile those practices with broader community norms and applicable law have incorporated sensitivity to cultural difference in their CPS protocols and have trained their professionals accordingly. Accessibility Interview by Kenneth A. (June 22, 2009) (on file with L & CP); interview by Kenneth A. Fla. Stat. This, in turn, should result in more consistent case outcomes as well as fewer false-positive and false-negative findings of maltreatment. Unlike CPS, which as an institution is increasingly incorporating the emotional and developmental effect of physical injuries into their assessment whether a particular incident of corporal punishment is abuse, courts appear rarely to consider the possibility that physical discipline may be emotionally or psychologically damaging to the child. Lansford Jennifer E, Dodge Kenneth. The Difference Between Discipline and Abuse, From Sticks to Flowers: Guidelines for Child Protection Professionals Working With Parents Using Scripture to Justify Corporal Punishment. The Global status report on violence against children 2020 monitors countries progress in implementing legislation and programmes that help reduce it. Code 300 (2006). FOIA Aggression and Antisocial Behavior in Youth. Corporal Punishment and the Cultural Defense. In particular, three negative effects of the status quo beg for at least a periodic reevaluation of the prospects for more-precise tools to make this distinction.6 We have already noted two of these effects: the laws failure to fulfill its expressive function (or the laws signaling problems) and inconsistent case outcomes. is Not Supported by the Data. WebCorporal punishment includes the use of physical force with either the parents hand or an instrument as a way of disciplining a child for what the parent considers to be inappropriate Stat. As a result, it sometimes appears that CPS intervenes in the family to protect a child based on a combination of concerns, including about the childs emotional and developmental welfare, only to have the court reject the intervention because the physical injury is viewed as insufficient (standing alone) to permit it. Evidence of the presence of these contexts is thus relevant to establishing child abuse. Corporal punishment is linked to a range of negative outcomes for children across countries and cultures, including physical and mental ill-health, impaired cognitive and socio-emotional development, poor educational outcomes, increased aggression and perpetration of violence. 2. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. 39.01(2) (West 2003 & Supp. The level of harm or injury necessary for an act of physical discipline to constitute abuse depends largely on each states statutory definition of abuse. Rodriguez CM, Brrig J P, Gracia E, Lila M. Children (Basel). In some cases, the act or injury may fall precisely within one of the enumerated classes. Cultural Normativeness as a Moderator. Thus, for example, judges in jurisdictions where the governing statute requires a finding of serious abuse before punishment is unlawful may read serious most seriously, to require that CPS show that the injury was life-threatening or at least permanently disfiguring. Dwyer James G. Parental Entitlement and Corporal Punishment. Ann. corporal punishment the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health. Careers, Unable to load your collection due to an error. Doing so, however, is antithetical to the purposes of the exception. On average, 17% of children experienced severe physical punishment (being hit on the head, face or ears or hit hard and repeatedly) but in some countries this figure exceeds 40%. Because they do some important good, however, and because their contents often reflect nonnormative parenting, either in fact or aspirationally, we do not suggest that they be eliminated. Child Abuse Negl. The site is secure. MeSH A Population-Based Comparison of Clinical and Outcome Characteristics of Young Children With Serious Inflicted and Noninflicted Traumatic Brain Injury. Second, a young child or a child with a mental or emotional disability may lack the capacity to understand the purpose of the discipline or appreciate its deterrent effect.102 A spanking that has no disciplinary value because the child lacks the capacity to understand its purpose is more likely to be unreasonable or excessive. http://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws-policies/statutes/define.pdf, http://www.childwelfare.gov/can/defining/state.cfm, http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspxTabId=17800, http://www.michigan.gov/dhs/0,1607,7-124-5452_7119_7194-159484--,00.html, http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/pediatrics;110/3/644.pdf, http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1810.pdf, http://www.dontshake.org/sbs.php?topNavID=3&subNavID=28&navID=115. Thus, in order to fulfill their professional obligations, case workers, prosecutors, and judges should be regularly educated about the status of scientific evidence in child abuse and be trained to interpret that evidence. 12-18-103(2)(A)(vi) (2009). External considerations include factors that may be part of other protocols inapplicable to the threshold maltreatment assessment, community norms, and personal histories, training, and ideology. At the same time, the investigations cause or risk causing at least some emotional harm to the child and family.201 Incentivizing the states consideration of these concerns before it intervenes in the family should help to reduce the harm caused or risked by unnecessary interventions. It is especially tricky to do so in an ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse setting like the United States, particularly when the context relates to the intersection of intimate family matters and the relationship of the state to the family. Daily Stress and Use of Aggressive Discipline by Parents during the COVID-19 Pandemic. (2) The definitions yield inconsistent case outcomes. Although the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse is drawn initially by CPS and only sometimes and subsequently in a judicial proceeding, the practice required by and principles underlying these rules ought to apply throughout the process. In the United States, the normative consensus appears to be that outsiders to the family are appropriately concerned only when the physical injury at issue causes serious harm; any injury short of a serious one is exclusively family business.. The line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse will never be exact. Additionally, and again regardless of the constitutional status of the right to use corporal punishment, most child-maltreatment investigations implicate constitutional limits on state searches and seizures, including the requirement that the state establish a likelihood of maltreatment before it intervenes.200 Second, most CPS investigations result in a finding of no maltreatment. Even in states that lack physical-discipline exceptions within their family or juvenile-court codes, courts have recognized a parents physical-discipline privilege based on a statutory privilege found in the criminal code or a common-law privilege. Third, as a practical matter, most parents do not have the knowledge or resources necessary to prove the standard proposed below, particularly the second prong: that the corporal punishment at issue does not cause functional impairment. Parents corporal-punishment behaviors are relatively likely to lead to the childs functional impairment if the punishment is committed in the heat of anger or out of control (such as alcohol-induced behavior); if it communicates rejection of the child (as when accompanied by hateful words); if it is intentionally cruel, not embedded in a broader relationship of trust and security between parent and child, or if not obviously intended to help the child learn a specific lesson; if it indicates no understanding of the childs ability to receive the message of the behavior; or if it is not preceded by the childs misbehavior. Moreover, intervention in the family itself causes or risks harm to children and families and thus ought to be avoided unless supported by reliable indicia that intervention will do more good than harm.192. The site is secure. Future functional impairment is (in all contexts) an estimate that has a probability attached to it, for example: highly likely, somewhat likely, unlikely to be impaired in a domain such as academic, mental health, or daily living. For example, a parents choice to hit a child on the face or to put pepper in a childs mouth might trigger scrutiny and even substantiation according to an illustrative list in a particular state or county, 224 but may not result in harm if other criteria such as severity or chronicity are absent. The Effect of Personal Characteristics on Reporting Child Maltreatment. The .gov means its official. Abuse: In abuse, the actions can be impulsive and full of aggression and resentment. Abuse Thus, parents rights to force children to work for hire have been curtailed according to their developmental capacity for such work and to assure that they have the time to go to school and to rest so that they are at least competent at that enterprise.146 Parents right to choose where their children are educated is intact, but gone is their right not to educate their children at all, because children need an education to be successful citizens.147 Finally, although [i]t is clear that a parent has the right to corporally discipline his or her child, a right derived from our constitutional right to privacy[,] this right must be exercised in a reasonable manner.148 Reasonableness has always been the standard, of course, but because its legal iteration is tied to social norms, as these norms evolve to countenance less harm and, at least in some circumstances, to narrow the forms of acceptable corporal punishment, parental autonomy and the boundaries of family privacy have been correspondingly reduced.149, Lawyers and the judiciary, particularly appellate judges, are well versed in the legal doctrine of parental autonomy and its philosophical underpinnings. This probability is based on matching the parents behavior and childs current status with a scientific literature that says if the parents behavior is. 2007) (emphasis added). sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal In exercising the discretion required for this evaluation, one frontline investigator in Kansas explained her feeling that a childs fear of a parent is an important factor that should be taken seriously.85 In contrast, some investigators think the fear of being punished is insufficient.86 One North Carolina CPS supervisor in a rural county hesitated to consider fear a good indicator of abuse.87 She explained by describing her experience with corporal punishment growing up: When I was a child and my daddy said I was going to get beat when I got home, I was certainly scared and fearful of going home, but this is not abuse.88 A particularly provocative example of the relevance of personal and professional perspectives involves social workers views of the relevance of family privacy and parents rights to the maltreatment determination. sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal For example, the North Carolina Court of Appeals held that bruises on a childs arm and upper buttocks lasting for several days were insufficient to establish that the child, who had been beaten with a belt, was abused. Except in obvious and very extreme cases, developmental science cannot guide the identification of specific parental behaviors that will lead inevitably to the childs functional impairment. Basing decisionmaking about the reasonableness of corporal punishment on a combination of parental-autonomy norms and scientific evidence about harm, as this functional-impairment test would do, is not new. The results of this data collection are described below. Several states have chosen to codify the common-law standard as we suggest, as a two-pronged test requiring that accused parents establish both a disciplinary motive and the reasonableness of the force used.210 As to the first, disciplinary prong, some states require a finding that discipline be reasonable in the circumstances, whereas others require a finding of necessity.211 The necessity standard places a much higher burden on parents: it is literally the difference between having to establish that the community would or should find a particular discipline acceptable and that the community would or should find such discipline necessary. Edwards Leonard P. Corporal Punishment and the Legal System. Most children are exposed to both psychological and physical means of punishment. First, the need for discipline in many instances is a judgment call whose merits cannot be established with precision, perhaps particularly by outsiders to the family. Because corporal punishment is so frequently justified by referring to religious teachings and values, a discussion of those religious teachings and values is needed. Scope of the problem Implementation and enforcement of laws to prohibit physical punishment. Finally, although lists of illustrative violations in statutory definitions and CPS protocols may help to reduce parents and reporters concerns about the breadth and vagueness of typical child-abuse definitions, the listed behaviors do not necessarily correspond with harm or functional impairment. They are often willing to view physical discipline, even physical discipline that causes minor physical injury to the child, as reasonable, provided the parents disciplinary act was a legitimate attempt to correct the childs misbehavior.117 If the evidence suggests that a parent was instead acting viciously out of anger or cruelty, however, courts are not willing to afford parents the same discretion.118 Many courts that do not explicitly evaluate the necessity of the disciplinary act still take into account the parents motivation by considering whether the parent employed physical discipline in a manner indicative of her desire to help, not harm, the child.119 Specifically, courts consider whether the parent-administered discipline in a controlled manner, whether the parent was angry when he or she administered the discipline, and whether any evidence suggests a malicious intent.120, Finally, when evaluating whether a finding of abuse is warranted, courts commonly refer to a parents right to administer reasonable physical discipline.121 The courts explicit recognition of this right as part of an attempt to draw the line between physical abuse and reasonable physical discipline suggests thatunlike some CPS agencies and professionals, who view their role primarily as saving children from their parents122courts are focused either on simultaneously protecting children and preserving parents disciplinary autonomy, or, in some cases, primarily on the latter.123.
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