Bill in Congress to Ban School Corporal Punishment

U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY 4th District) has introduced H.R. 5628, a bill in Congress to ban school corporal punishment. School children need your support now! Here's how you can help: Call, email or write your U.S. Representative and ask for support of H.R. 5628 and ask your Representative to tell Representative McCarthy that he/she will co-sponsor the bill. Contact information for your Representative can be found at: www.congress.org. On the right side of the page, put your zip code in the section where it says Find Your Lawmakers. What to say: "Please support H.R. 5628 , a bill to ban school corporal punishment. Here are some reasons why: (1) Twenty states still allow corporal punishment in schools and over 223,000 school children are hit each year, (2) Corporal punishment can lead to student injuries and law suits against school boards, (3) Over fifty national organizations including the National Education Association, the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association oppose school corporal punishment. Will you support the bill? Will you co-sponsor the bill? Thank you for your support."

More information about effects of school corporal punishment and alternatives to its use can be found at: www.stophitting.com/index.php?page=atschool-main and www.nospank.net

The April 15th, 2010 testimony and video on banning school corporal punishment in the U.S. House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities is available at: http://edlabor.house.gov/hearings/2010/04/corporal-punishment-in-school.shtml Thank you for helping to make our schools safer for children. Please forward this to others who might help protect school children! Nadine Block and Deb Sendek Center for Effective Discipline www.stophitting.com email: info@stophitting.com Telephone: 614-221-8829

Harris County Texas Sends Strong Message to People Who Hit Kids

GOOD NEWS IN the battle against corporal punishment in schools! But not everyone, especially some in Houston’s black community, agrees.

This week two teachers, a principal and a superintendent were charged in connection with an April 29 videotaped beating of a 13 year-old student at Houston’s Jaime’s House Charter School.

The cell phone video shows the teacher, 40 year-old Sheri Lynn Davis, throwing a desk and then attacking a cornered and crouching Isaiah Reagins. Other students can be heard laughing and clapping as Reagins is then dragged across the floor, repeatedly slapped, punched and kicked. The boy’s mother said her son suffered knots, bruises and a black eye from the attack.

[1]Davis was placed on administrative leave on May 5, after the boy’s mother notified the school about the incident. Witnesses said Davis “snapped” after Reagins made fun of a special needs student. Several students told police officers that four or five teachers watched the incident and threatened them if the video ever went public.

Davis was later fired from the school and then issued a public apology during a press conference at her attorney’s office. She has been handed a felony charge for the beating and faces up to 10 years in prison.

But Davis is not alone.

Charges have been filed against teacher Gabriel Hahn Moseley who was in the room at the time but failed to report the incident. She too was fired from Jaime’s House after an investigation. School Superintendent Ollie Hilliard and Principal David Jones were also charged with failure to report child abuse. The misdemeanor charges against the trio carry a maximum punishment of one year in prison.

A spokesperson for Jamie’s House said both Jones and Hilliard were shocked by the charges against them and said they are without merit.

In a surprising turn of events, Isaiah Reagins’s grandmother has said that the incident is being blown out of proportion. She says she agrees with the charges against Davis, but does not approve of the charges against Moseley, Hilliard and Jones.

Now, some of Houston’s black communities, political leaders and activists are criticizing Harris County prosecutors for pursuing criminal charges against the school staff. They fear that the school, which serves 130 at risk teens, will be forced to close.

“These charges against Jones and Hilliard are just overreaching,” said community activist Deric Muhammad. “One child has already been hurt. We don’t want 129 other children to be hurt. We want to learn from what has happened to Isaiah. We don’t want what happened to be exploited.”

Harris County Sheriff’s Office Spokesperson Christina Garza said investigators hope to send a strong message with the charges.

“The message that we want to send to people, regardless of where they work or who they are, is to report any type of incident – especially one involving a student or child being beat or kicked or struck. Failure to do so is a crime,” Garza said.

I applaud Harris County officials for this move. And I understand why Houston’s black community is upset.

The fact that a black teacher had the audacity to beat a child in a classroom, that black teachers stood around and watched, a black superintendent and a black principal tried to cover up the incident, and black students clapped and applauded during the beating speaks volumes about the perverse embrace of violence against children in black communities and throughout the society.

Too many black children are growing up to accept violence as a part of life and too many black people hit children, endorse it or look the other way when it happens. When parents, teachers and childcare providers hit children those acts reinforce that violence serves a normal function in our communities. To tell black parents and guardians to abstain from hitting their children is one battle. But to make an entire community, a village of people, reprogram themselves into thinking that hitting children is a form of violence is another monster!

I see black children being slapped, popped, whipped, yanked, threatened and cussed at in public spaces all the time. Dare I say something to the parent and I will be derided and even threatened. I watch people turn away or look on horrified, helpless and afraid to say something.

Houston’s black community might be outraged at the charges, but maybe their negative reactions speaks to their own fear of losing the power to control defenseless children through their reliance on violent childrearing tactics, ones that have been transmitted through generations of African Americans since slavery. But the fact is, Davis, Moseley, Jones and Williams broke the law and they should be held accountable, just as we would expect if those perpetrators had been whites that attacked a black child.

The law requires teachers and other professionals who interact with children to report incidents or suspicion of child abuse to authorities within 48 hours. But herein lies another problem: this law which is designed to protect the safety of children, exists in states like Texas where corporal punishment is legal.

How can we expect teachers to report incidents or suspicion of abuse when they are also given consent to do the very same thing they are asked to combat? I hope this incident in Houston will be exploited to prove that very point.

Violence should be foreign to children in school, at the grocery store, on the bus, in church — everywhere!

By Stacey Patton, June 25, 2010

Stacey Patton is the Senior Editor of The Defenders Online and a writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Article printed from The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog: www.thedefendersonline.com

Spanking: A Cruel Retrogressive Habit

A letter to Project NoSpank
from Louise Gordon

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I BELIEVE THAT peaceful relationships and harmonious ways of life will remain remote and idyllic fantasies as long as corporal punishment remains an acceptable part of child rearing. As dependents, children can be as much "prisoners of their parents as they are of schools."
— Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Are the imaginations of educators, parents and all other adults so impoverished that they cannot arrive at more humane practices than spanking children in order to counter misdeeds and misbehavior? Is it any wonder that children adopt defensive coping mechanisms when they can have their clothes yanked off and their naked buttocks beaten with household weapons such as paddles, belts and whatnot? And this, during a period when young children are being taught modesty and the importance of remaining clothed rather than running around stark naked after a bath or on a hot summer day.

A conflicted message children are given here, when they are also taught that parents can violate their modesty and bodily integrity and human dignity at will. With that violation comes emotional trauma and fear, even terror, over pain that an adult is inflicting while the child remains defenseless against the aggressive "pedagogical" or punitive assault.

Is it any wonder that when treated this way by their "nearest and dearest," that children, wholly dependent on parents not only for love but also survival, develop ambivalent and dysfunctional attitudes towards intimacy and close bonds, both desiring and fearing them? Is it any wonder that they may adopt a spate of maladaptive behaviors, from aggressiveness to timidity and withdrawal, from fear of and misdirected rebellion against "authority" to inordinate approval seeking and desire to please? And is any lesson learned about the behavior that precipitated a spanking?

Or has the child simply learned to avoid getting caught? It seems to me that penalties for wrongdoing are inherent in the misdeed and are thus unavoidable, and one learns through such experience. Piling punishment on top of penalty is a different matter. If it must exist as a means of teaching people to distinguish between good and evil, then can we not, as a society, insist that it be humane? The very combination of words sounds oxymoronic.

The British seem to have had a special cultural flair for caning, flogging and such. A glance at the work of Algernon Swinburne and Ian Gibson's book "The English Vice" gives a clue concerning the grotesque distortions, the "kinky," sado- masochistic or dysfunctional patterns of human sexuality that can result from such childhood abuse. This is an extreme and, one hopes, exceptional, but if spanking is normative, then dysfunction can also become the norm.

How many people cringe, as if to fend off a physical blow, when other people's voices are raised in anger? How many women and children are cowed, walking on egg shells at home, because a male "head of household" threatens violence while shaking a fist and demanding silence, even though that man never actually delivers a blow?

I seriously doubt that a more humane and educated world will be realized if, as a society, we perpetuate customary cruelty such as inflicting physical pain on children as part of our impoverished didactic repertoire, and as long as physical force remains the final arbiter of all human disputes.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, said Lord Acton. Who has more power to abuse other humans than large parents, upon whom small children are dependent?

Like the big taboos of sex and death, this subject can be shame inducing. It may cause cracks in the fragile self-esteem of spankers and spankees alike. Fortunately, Project No Spank is bringing truth to light on this topic, the effects of which are deeply ingrained in attitudes and ways of being and relating to one another. So often people's need to think well of themselves, to salvage fragile "self-esteem"--based on false competitive win-lose, power-over mindsets to start with--overrides the search for truth. Without seeking truth, there is no hope of aligning ourselves, our minds, and our actions more closely with it. When adults inflict pain on children as a means of punishment, coercion and behavior control, clearly, they are not approximating the embodiment of truth and love revealed to humanity through the wisest traditions in philosophy and the world's great spiritual disciplines.

The use of physical pain to control children is not only unloving, but also unreasonable. Children should be reasoned with through language and intellect, not coerced through physical pain and humiliation. Children who are unable to comprehend reasoning, two-year-olds, for example, need to be kept out of harm's way by adults, not punished with spankings if they make a mistake that could cause injury to themselves or others, a mistake that adults call "misbehavior."

The whipping post and slavery were abolished in the United States. It is time to recognize spanking as the cruel retrogressive habit that it is, left over from the era when Americans owned other humans and were free to treat them with less care than inanimate objects.

Whether as part of toxic parenting or poisonous pedagogy, human beings no longer can afford to indulge in inflicting pain as an "efficient" means of modifying behavior. As Alice Miller says, "every smack is a humiliation." Some smacks prove fatal, while all are injurious to human dignity and diminish the human community in which we all must live. If children are human, they have rights that no adult should be able to violate with impunity.

© 2004 by Louise Gordon — May 4, 2004