The general case against beating children

There are good non-bdsm reasons for not hitting children. We know that it doesn’t work, that it makes kids more violent, and that there that there are other, more effective ways of disciplining children. That should be enough to end the practice, right there.

But we also know that it operates in a racist way: that children from ethnic minorities are the most likely to be beaten in schools. We also know something that may be marginally more horrific, which is that children with a disability are the most likely to be beaten.

In short, it’s cruel, it’s deliberately degrading, it doesn’t work, and (despite my respect for the teaching profession as a whole) the schools that allow “corporal punishment” have amply demonstrated that they are incapable in implementing it “fairly”, that is, without racism or bias against people with a disability.

It needs to be outlawed. Now.

The bdsm-related case against beating children

The bdsm case against child beating is that ritualised beating, especially on the buttocks, is sexual. Forcing sex acts on a child is sexual abuse. “Corporal punishment” is child-molesting.

Vile book, by vile people, advocates child-beating (also punishment starvings). It is implicated in the deaths of three children.

People who argue against this usually make two claims. The first claim is that school and parental beatings are different from sexual beatings. Because they hurt too much to be sexual.

All they’re saying is that they don’t know anything at all about sexual spankings. Sexual spankings can be delivered using a paddle or cane, and be far harder than anything that could legally be inflicted in a school.

Doms soon learn that some submissives can have an amazing ability to take and eroticise pain. In my own experience as a dom, the upper limit can be my own squeamishness, and not the submissive’s desires and response. There is no identifiable point at which a spanking is “too hard to be sexual”.

People who say, “Beat children hard and then they won’t be turned on,” are revealing some ugly things about themselves. One of those things is that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  

The other claim is that beating is only sexual for a tiny minority of the population, as if it’s okay if it’s a sexual act in a few cases, because it’s worth it for all the yummy pain, fear and humiliation it inflicts on children.

But their belief, or at least claim, that only a tiny minority of the population is likely to interpret a beating sexually is wrong. That’s a matter of established fact.

About 10% of child-beatings at school are likely to be sexually charged for at least one of the participants, the punisher or the beaten child. So, of the approximate 326,400 child-beatings in US schools, each year, about 32,600 involve an adult or a child who is directly aware, from their own reaction, that this is a sexually charged act.

Tomorrow we’re going to explore a question whose answer seems comically obvious. But it is worth thinking about it: So a significant proportion of both teachers and children are responding sexually to child-beatings in schools: what’s wrong with that?

Does child-beating in schools “cause” people do become involved in bdsm as adults?

In one sense the answer is “yes”. 

Charles Moser’s research on a bdsm community in California found that about 5% of the community members had became aware of their sexual interest through a childhood spanking. About one in 20 (that ratio keeps coming up in this context!) bdsm participants were launched on their bdsm career by being spanked by an adult, when they were a child. 

Disciplinary conditions at the Shelbyville Baptist School were strict because … Jesus.

Although that’s a minority of bdsm participants, and it’s not the only experience that makes people aware of their response to bdsm, that means it’s still common for adult participants in bdsm to have had their first bdsm sexual experience, which they remember as a sexual experience, while being beaten as a child. 

So how many people are we talking about?

If we apply Moser’s finding to the 16,000,000 people who take part in bdsm or sexual spanking in the United States alone, that comes to 800,000 Americans.

Given the strong advocacy for child-beating from the US Chrstian right, which  hates everything they consider to be “perversion”, it’s ironic that so many people have the US Christian right to thank for their bdsm sexual awakening.  

Bdsm “trigger events” 

In another sense the answer is “probably not, exactly”.

That’s because some people have some genetic susceptibility to interest in bdsm, but they need a trigger event, something to show them bdsm and its erotic possibilities, before they develop that interest.

A similar process – genetic susceptibility plus a trigger event to bring out that genetic potential – applies in the development of phobias. I’m not comparing bdsm to phobias in any other sense, of course.

Child-beatings in schools are only one kind of event that can trigger an interest in bdsm, and particularly in sexual spankings. If you remove child-beating from the mix, there would still be plenty of other triggers that a bdsm-susceptible person will notice and respond to.

Potential bdsm triggers include passages in books, scenes in movies, in TV shows, in fashion shows, images on advertising billboards, and so on.

A hot night in Castle Anthrax. Spankee doctors Winston and Piglet

I know a woman who discovered her interest in submission during a screening of, of all things, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was the scene where a bunch of Glasgow girls dressed as novices (hah! I’ve been to Glasgow) demand to be spanked.

The woman was surprised to find she thought it was even sexier than it was funny. It stayed with her.

She kept on saying the punch line, “And … after the spanking, the oral sex!” at odd moments for years afterwards. Caught my attention, anyway.

The point is, the trigger event can be something that other people don’t see as sexual at all. 

When “corporal punishment” is finally banned in all schools, and parents are educated about spanking’s sexual payload, bdsm won’t disappear or even shrink. People who have a propensity to notice and react erotically to bdsm triggers, including spankings, will mostly become bdsm-aware through some other stimulus instead. 

But it’s better that people pick this sexual interest, bdsm, voluntarily in their own time, and not through a dangerous punishment ritual forced on them by an adult.

How often will both the teacher and the child be aroused during a “spanking”?

The 5% rule means there are likely to be 816 instances a year where both the teacher and the child are mutually aroused by the spanking experience they are sharing. 

However, the true number is likely to be more than that. Because children who discover an arousing situation are liable to search it out – or make sure it happens – so they can experience it again.

It’s a great porn scenario, and it can be a fun role-play for those that role-play. But it belongs in fiction, not the real world. Love her specs, by the way.

Likewise, teachers choose who they beat. Only a small proportion of school children and young people in schools get beaten. Children selected for beatings tend to be from minority ethnic groups or to have a disability.

Also, they tend to be the vulnerable children.

They won’t be the children who have powerful, well-connected parents, but they will be the ones who have a single working parent, or parents who are highly unlikely to have the skills or the networks to challenge the authority of the school.

We also know that within those minority groups some children are likely to be singled out and repeatedly beaten. (That makes nonsense of one of the key supposed justifications of child-beating: that it has a “deterrent effect”.)

Some of the children will be repeatedly beaten because they are “badly behaved”. Beating a “badly behaved” child may sound like easier work than trying to find out what the problem is, but any teacher with any experience knows that hitting a child only means you have to hit them again, because it doesn’t change “bad behaviour”.

There can be multiple motivations in play. As we’ve noted, the children who are picked for repeated beatings are those whose parents are least able to do anything about it. 

But there’s another issue. The priests and lay brothers (and others: this isn’t just a problem in religious schools) who raped children after beating them, selected their victims for powerless and “attractiveness”. A child who is in one of the vulnerable categories is therefor more likely to be beaten if he or she is perceived to be “pretty”. 

There are also the children who have a nascent sexual response to their beating. This may be hard to explain to people who don’t include spanking in their sex lives. But the fact is that anyone who has spanked a few people of the sex or sexes they prefer knows when the spanking is working and their “victim” is turned on. It can be a subtle thing, a matter of a certain kind of silence and attention, of small body movements and so on during the spanking, and the abstracted emotional tone they have afterwards. 

Teachers who have bdsm sensitivity will recognise those and similar signs. That child and that teacher, who is in denial about their own attraction to spanking, or is aware of it and unscrupulous, will meet again, and re-enact that ritual, in an odd form of erotic courtship and release.

This isn’t common. It’s somewhere over 0.25% of all school beatings. The odds are that it won’t any particular parent’s children who get caught up in that cruel and unfairly balanced erotic ritual, but it will be someone’s children.