The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,266

several countries of Western Europe. The United Nations and the European Union have called on all their member nations to abolish spanking. Several countries have launched public awareness campaigns against the practice, and twenty-four have now made it illegal.

The prohibition of spanking represents a stunning change from millennia in which parents were considered to own their children, and the way they treated them was considered no one else’s business. But it is consistent with other intrusions of the state into the family, such as compulsory schooling, mandatory vaccination, the removal of children from abusive homes, the imposition of lifesaving medical care over the objections of religious parents, and the prohibition of female genital cutting by communities of Muslim immigrants in European countries. In one frame of mind, this meddling is a totalitarian imposition of state power into the intimate sphere of the family. But in another, it is part of the historical current toward a recognition of the autonomy of individuals. Children are people, and like adults they have a right to life and limb (and genitalia) that is secured by the social contract that empowers the state. The fact that other individuals—their parents—stake a claim of ownership over them cannot negate that right.

American sentiments tend to weight family over government, and currently no American state prohibits corporal punishment of children by their parents. But when it comes to corporal punishment of children by the government, namely in schools, the United States has been turning away from this form ofof violence. Even in red states, where three-quarters of the people approve of spanking by parents, only 30 percent approve of paddling in schools, and in the blue states the approval rate is less than half that.188 And since the 1950s the level of approval of corporal punishment in schools has been in decline (figure 7–18). The growing disapproval has been translated into legislation. Figure 7–19 shows the shrinking proportion of American states that still allow corporal punishment in schools.

FIGURE 7–18. Approval of corporal punishment in schools in the United States, 1954–2002

Sources: Data for 1954–94 from Gallup, 1999; data for 2002 from ABC News, 2002.

FIGURE 7–19. American states allowing corporal punishment in schools, 1954–2010

Source: Data from Leiter, 2007.

The trend is even more marked in the international arena, where corporal punishment in schools is now seen as a violation of human rights, like other forms of extrajudicial government violence. It has been condemned by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Human Rights Committee, and the UN Committee Against Torture, and has been banned by 106 countries, more than half of the world’s total.189

Though a majority of Americans still endorse corporal punishment by parents, they draw an increasingly sharp line between mild violence they consider discipline, such as spanking and slapping, and severe violence they consider abuse, such as punching, kicking, whipping, beating, and terrorizing (for example, threatening a child with a knife or gun, or dangling it over a ledge). In his surveys of domestic violence, Straus gave respondents a checklist that included punishments that are now considered abusive. He found that the number of parents admitting to them almost halved between 1975 and 1992, from 20 percent of mothers to a bit more than 10 percent.190

A problem in self-reports of violence by perpetrators (as opposed to self-reports by victims) is that a positive response is a confession to a wrongdoing. An apparent decline in parents beating their children may really be a decline in parents owning up to it. At one time a mother who left bruises on her child might consider it within the range of acceptable discipline. But starting in the 1980s, a growing number of opinion leaders, celebrities, and writers of television dramas began to call attention to child abuse, often by portraying abusive parents as reprehensible ogres or grown-up children as permanently scarred. In the wake of this current, a parent who bruised a child in anger might keep her mouth shut when the surveyor called. We do know that child abuse had become more of a stigma in this interval. In 1976, when people were asked, “Is child abuse a serious problem in this country?” 10 percent said yes; when the same question was asked in 1985 and 1999, 90 percent said yes.191 Straus argued that the downward trend in his violence survey captured both a decline in the acceptance of abuse and a decline in actual abuse; even if much of the decline was in acceptance, he added, that would