Maureen Anderson wrote:
>
> >
> Shared like that, I imagine those who
> felt the actual sting of the slap experienced something worlds apart
> from an isolated kid dealt a slap of identical force in some
> self-enclosed North American household.
I think this is probably central. 'Laws' that apply to a more public and/or collective realm become transformed in the nuclear family (including one-parent families). And incidentally there is also a difference between "slaps" (particularly the public, institutionalized slaps you describe but also even slaps [say in anger] and formal corporal punishment, more or less in cold blood -- on principle rather than on impulse.
The latter kind do I suspect contribute to the punitive atmosphere which permeates U.S. life; it naturalizes as it were the idea that if something is wrong, punish someone for it, like dropping all those bombs on Serbia for excample, or starving a few million Iraqi.
No direct causation is claimed here, but just the total framework within which all evils are individualized. In this country public punishment of a child is usually not really in response to the child's act but in response to the expectations of others: the need to keep up face as a parent.
Is it an urban legend or is the story that Inuit never struck children or raised their voices to them true?
Carrol
>
> These are hackneyed contrasts -- bourgeois US, rural West Africa --
> but probably no more overdrawn than some sweeping assertions floating
> around about physical punishment, always and everywhere.
>
> Maureen