When Ellen Reddy learned of a predominantly white school district in south-west Missouri that reinstated corporal punishment as a last resort for disciplining students, Reddy, who raised two Black boys and is a grandmother, became upset. Even in the modern-day US, Black children like her grandchildren are still twice as likely to be beaten in schools as white children.
The return of corporal punishment in Cassville, Missouri, where school board officials once abandoned the practice in 2001, departs from a national decline in the use of corporal punishment in schools.
Yet experts and activists told the Guardian that its re-emergence in Missouri reflects just how the practice has continued in certain school districts affecting tens of thousands of students nationally, especially in 19 states where corporal punishment – physical discipline by spanking, paddling or other means – is allowed.
Decades of research show that such practices exacerbate behavioral issues for children of color and children with disabilities in the long run. Activists have renewed calls to end the practice nationally.
“Schools are the only public institution where you can legally hit a child,” Reddy, executive director of the Nollie Jenkins Family Center, a non-profit in Mississippi that advocates for abolishing corporal punishment in schools statewide. “It’s not OK whether the child is white, Black or Latino. The violence needs to stop.”
Sarah Font, an associate professor of sociology and public policy at Pennylvania State University, told the Guardian that the Missouri district’s decision was unusual. “Corporal punishment in schools has been on the decline for such a long time,” Font says. “There’s increased awareness of how ineffective it is as a discipline strategy and the potential for harm.”
Corporal punishment is more likely to be allowed in southern states, particularly in districts in poorer, rural areas and with a high proportion of Black children. She added that districts that allowed corporal punishment were also located in Republican-leaning areas that are also more evangelical, where social conservatism is at play.
“There’s a traditional use and acceptance of corporal punishment as a discipline strategy in those communities,” Font says. “There’s either more support from or less pushback from parents on the whole there to allow it.”
In recent years, four states banned corporal punishment against students with disabilities, University of Texas at Austin professor Elizabeth Gershoff told the Associated Press.
But more than 70,00 children in public schools were subjected to corporal punishment in the 2017-2018 school year, according to federal data. That could be an undercount given that private schools in 48 states allow the practice, and federal data is not collected on those possible incidents.
Black children and students with disabilities are disproportionately beaten in public schools, alongside other disciplinary practices such as suspensions, restraint, or seclusion, even among preschoolers.
Dick Startz, a professor of economics at University of California Santa Barbara, found in a Brookings Institution study that three states accounted for 71% of corporal punishment incidents against Black children: Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. In Georgia, Black children are 50% more likely to be beaten in schools than white children, even as incidents declined between 2012 and 2018, Startz found.
In the Missouri district in Cassville, school officials are allowing parents to opt into whether “certified personnel” can physically discipline children after all other options such as suspensions have been used.
Stacey Patton, a research associate professor at Morgan State University’s Institute for Urban Research, argued that the persistence of corporal punishment in southern states results from a “continuation of that racialized coercion and violence against Black bodies” that draw from the early days of slavery and lynching. A November 2019 study in the journal Social Problems concluded that the concentration of schools located in states where the highest number of lynchings occurred was “particularly predictive of corporal punishment for black students”.
“It’s historical trauma, it’s internalized racism,” Patton, author of the book Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America, says. “These are adults who are powerless to change these larger systems in their lives so they turn to the easy target, the most vulnerable among them, and they take out all that rage and frustration out on to their children.”
A 2016 meta-analysis of research on corporal punishment by parents concluded that beating children for disciplinary reasons was associated with aggression, mental health issues, lower self-esteem and lower cognitive ability. Children also suffered from poorer academic outcomes, raising doubt into the practice’s presence in school settings. In November 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics condemned corporal punishment by parents as a form of discipline, echoing a previous recommendation to abolish the practice in schools altogether.
“The way people experience corporal punishment may be culturally influenced,” Patton says. “But in terms of its biological outcomes, it’s the same unless you believe some racist pseudoscience.”
Though most states do not allow corporal punishment, the US remains an outlier: Gershoff’s research found that as of 2016, just 69 countries allowed corporal punishment in schools, noting that the practice is barred throughout Europe and in much of South America and eastern Asia.
In September 2021, Representative Donald McEachin of Virginia, Representative Suzanne Bonamici and Senator Chris Murphy introduced the Protecting Our Students in Schools Act, which sought to make the practice illegal throughout the US. In the 1970s, the US supreme court ruled that schools can engage in corporal punishment as a form of discipline in schools and left it to states and school districts to decide on where they stand.
Meanwhile, Reddy has worked with residents in Holmes county, Mississippi, for six years to lobby to ban the practice. She helped create the Mississippi Coalition to End Corporal Punishment to stop the practice across the state, which has the highest number of reported incidents in the country, according to federal data.
“We’ve been treated as underclass and devalued since we stepped foot in America. How is that going to change unless we truly looked back at our history?” Reddy asked. “Our children are as deserving as our white peers. Children should be treated the same.”
