Corporal Punishment and Gender

Corporal Punishment and Gender
Sunday February 05, 2006

From: Duncan Mcdermott

Some years ago I had joined the project No Spank website on which I later noticed an item posted by the organisers which claimed that girls are more affected by Corporal Punishment than boys. I complained to the organiser, one Riork, who emailed me back saying that it was just one point of view and not to be taken to seriously. The next day I recieved a bulk email message from another organiser stridently proclaiming that scientific evidence, which he detailed, ‘proving’ that girls are much more likely than boys to be affected adversely by Corporal Punishment. I emailed them and complained, asking him to remove this lie from his website and explaining that I took it as a personal insult. They refused to reply and so I quit the site and have never been back. I am feeling confused to see this site advertised on alice-miller.com

Where I went to school in South Africa, the Natal School Handbook and Regulations forbade the striking of ‘any girl’. For eleven years I was subjected to the demented acting out of female adults, who were the main initiators who sent boys to the headmaster to be beaten upon our buttocks. After the beating we had to return to the class of which fifty percent might have been girls. They would all stare at you. I still suffer sudden feelings of humiliation and fury when in female company, often triggered by their behaviour towards little boys.

I hope other people who read this will find it in them to challenge the demented pretence on other websites that hitting boys is not so bad as hitting girls.

AM: I think that if we have suffered corporal punishment (and who did not?), we will be often triggered by any kind of nonsense people will tell us about. Who can prove “scientifically” which gender is more beaten? What has happened (or still happens?) in British public schools is no longer a secret, I hope. What happens to small boys and girls in their own homes before they go to school must still be discovered.