To the Macomb (County, Michigan) Daily

Your recent AP article, "Smacks of good news, Study: Moderate childhood spankings cause no lasting harm" [Aug 25, 2001, A4] drew an unwarranted journalistic conclusion in favor of "feel good child hitting." Beyond the headline bias the report itself did not even ask the right questions let alone find the right answers. Even so the report found no harm to unspanked kids and harm to many children who were spanked--so the opposite headline would be closer to the truth.

What did this "study" actually find? The two authors were not looking at long term psychological problems such as induced sexual fetishes, nor did they examine the rate of addiction of all types that the spanked and unspanked children will grow into. They did not examine the effect of older children being spanked--so we don't know if some parents continued to spank older kids while others quit. If this was recorded in the study the news "blurb" did not see fit to print it. From the news article we have no idea, in fact, what constituted "spanking" -- whether it caused redness or bruises, was done "bare butt" or with partial undress, what age it started at and what age it ended, or if any of the "spanking parents" actually quit spanking at a very early age and were for all practical purposes non-spankers, or with what frequency spanking was carried out.

The "study"--if it was designed to compare spanking to non-spanking, was statistically insignificant as well. The news article seemed to indicate that the authors examined only 4 families that did not use spanking and 96 that did, whereas the study would have had much more meaning had they compared equal sized groups.

But the research, even if limited, dated, and statistically flawed, was ok as far as it went. Why did the journalists decide to spin it as, "smacks of good news" and tell us that hitting kids is harmless? 7% of the spanked kids did develop psychological problems--which the authors attributed to questionable practices in some parent's "spanking." Why couldn't the headline reflect that and read, "Spanking causes depression, anxiety, and behavior problems in 7% of victims?" Would we allow any children's product on the market that had that rate of serious failure, let alone hundreds of deaths every year? The two women who directed the study supposed that the harmful spanking parents somehow "spanked wrong," but I would bet every one of them thought they were "doing it right." There is no way for a hitting parent to know if they are "hitting correctly" and no way for anyone to teach them whether they are or aren't. Hitting and violence are unmeasurable and unscientific in themselves. Any "science" trying to recommend it is as flawed as trying to analyze lottery numbers to see which ones are likely to be winners the next day. There are too many variables in human violence, including that which we euphemistically like to call "spanking," to promote its use or to pretend to make a "science" out of it.

This study was also extremely limited in its assessment of "harm" from spanking and it did not examine many key types of known damage. The shocking conclusion should be that even with this simplistic and incomplete analysis, and even with authors who were apparently trying to show spanking to be harmless, and even with this small sample, they still found problems.

The women looked only at three "snapshots" of their child subjects--ages 4, 9, and 14. The kids of that age, particularly 14, are old enough to be experiencing sexual deviant fantasies from spanking, but I doubt they were asked about it and I'm not too sure they would admit it if they did. Statistically we have a pretty good idea that perhaps 5 or 6 boys and 1 or 2 girls in that group of 100 kids already have active sexual fantasies related to spanking, and that within a few years maybe 30 of them will be spanking each other for sexual arousal. A recent survey of college students showed 11% of males have spanking fantasies, and 30% of college students admitted to carrying out spanking for sexual pleasure in college. The reason that more people do it than have fantasies is simple--not everyone has fantasies about any particular type of sex yet they may they enjoy doing it when they get a chance. The 11% of college men are what we might call spanking fetishists, while the 30% include more "normal" people who are also sexualized to spanking to a lesser degree. There are without a doubt even more college students who would enjoy spanking or being spanked who didn't have a willing partner or who were too ashamed to ask. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between those who were spanked and those who weren't in the incidence of these fantasies and sexual practices.

Yet another headline from the same data could read, "Good news--spanking is not necessary." Isn't that really better news? The study showed that kids who were never spanked did as well or better than the kids who were. Why do we have to "take a chance" on our spanked kids being some of the 7% that are mentally damaged? Is a 7% "defect rate" in spanked kids "acceptable" when the non-spanked kids did as well without the harm? Why do we like to spank so much if it does not raise better children? Isn't that the "reason" we give for hitting? Why take a chance on inducing something that is known to cause a common sexual fetish that this study did not even look at? Why do something violent that cannot be explained or taught how to "do it right" because the force of hitting is unscientific and unmeasurable, as are the hidden psychological damages?

I don't think a few pats to a toddler will necessarily cause great harm. I don't think that is "news" and it hardly merits study. I do know, however, that "spanking," in all of the forms that it is carried out across the US, is very harmful and does no good. Why promote it with "science" that doesn't really merit the conclusion?

Beyond the harm and induced fetishes spanking is often a hidden vehicle of sexual molestation--and we now know that much higher percentages of children are sexually molested than we ever thought in the past. Why maintain a socially acceptable practice that makes it so easy for molesters to strip our children and fondle their "spanking area" that we otherwise would recognize as sexual abuse?

Why do we love to spank so much? Why do we have "itching ears" to hear a "study" telling us that spanking is harmless, when it fact no such conclusion can be drawn? Is it because we "like to spank" and it is our modern "tradition of men?" Do we believe spanking, as we do it today, was taught in the Bible so we blindly support it even when we know it is harmful and useless? I'll pay $1,000 cash to the first person who can find a single bible verse, out of a translation, not a paraphrase, that teaches any adult to hit any child's buttocks with a hand, paddle or strap.

There is no good reason to spank a child and many reasons not to. It was never taught in the New Testament. Spanking was likewise never taught in the Old Testament any more than slavery and beating adults. We have no problem dropping the latter two--why cling to a modern perverted interpretation for children? A lot of us grew up with some measure of "spanking" and have done so with our children. We spank more than pretty much every industrialized country on earth and we have much more violence as well. We are mostly "ok" on the outside yet we see our society has a lot of problems that are hard to explain. Many Americans who would have appeared "normal" in this study nonetheless have serious hidden problems that were induced by family violence.

Why take chances with hitting when we now know we don't need it to raise children well? The real good news of the report is that it is healthier not to hit our kids--and when we consider the numerous related issues that this report didn't examine the case for nonviolent childcare gets even stronger. Spanked kids have greater risk of mental, sexual, and physical harm. Non-violently raised kids do as well or better than spanked kids in every way. That is the true conclusion of every study to date--and this one, despite the news spin, small sample size and narrow questions, is no exception.

Jeff Charles
31299 Burton Ave.
St. Clair Shores, MI 48082-1464
Jeff1844@aol.com
810-294-1117