why āspanking is harmfulā studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as āspankingā, are psychologically harmful. theyāve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think āI hit my child and Iām okay with thatā and/or āI was hit as a child and I donāt think thereās anything wrong with meā are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.
unfortunately, Iām here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but Iām gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Raiās work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts arenāt lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominance which they feel theyĀ are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are āhitting children for their own goodā, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the childās future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a āgoodā child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the childās well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of ācorrectiveā physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in peopleās minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be ākept in their placeā below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and godās law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someoneās idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parentsā decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their ārightā to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they canāt hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and thatās why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says childrenās rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
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