The Smack of Civilization: Why Spanking Is the Last Acceptable Violence

A global indictment of a discipline tactic that mimics abuse, distorts love, and rewires the brain for fear.

Introduction: The Pain We Sanitize

To strike a child is to demand obedience through fear. We rarely say it like that because the truth is far too ugly. So we wrap it in euphemism: discipline, correction, tough love. And then we feign surprise when the very children we taught to equate love with pain grow up emotionally stunted, aggressive, or silent in the face of violence.

Spanking isn’t parenting. It’s pain, rehearsed and rationalized until it becomes tradition, often upheld and defended not just by individuals, but by the institutions that shape culture itself. Religious doctrines have invoked the 'spare the rod' adage to lend divine legitimacy to corporal punishment, while colonial governments and rigid school systems embedded it into discipline codes as a tool for controlling the poor and the colonized. What began as violence was converted into virtue by repetition, framed as moral guidance, and passed down like sacred scripture, until we forgot to question it at all. But the data, meticulously gathered across continents, generations, and cultures, tell a different story. It tells us that the bruises we don't see, the neurological grooves we carve through early trauma, last far longer than the red marks that fade.

This is not just a parenting issue. It is a moral, psychological, and global failure to protect the most vulnerable from state-sanctioned violence inside the very homes meant to nurture them. The science is settled. The ethics are clear. The question isn’t if spanking is harmful.

It’s why the hell we still allow it.

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Part I: The Science Is Settled

Spanking doesn’t work. Let’s just start there. It doesn’t work to improve behavior. It doesn’t teach lessons. And it doesn’t make kids more disciplined. The opposite is true. The long-term effects of spanking mirror those of outright abuse in both behavior and brain function.

Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor (2016) conducted one of the largest meta-analyses to date, 161,000 children, 75 studies, and found that spanking is associated with 13 out of 17 negative behavioral outcomes. These include increased aggression, antisocial behavior, mental health issues, and lower cognitive ability. Not one positive outcome was found. Not one. This finding is echoed by Straus and Paschall (2009), who demonstrated that corporal punishment is linked to lower cognitive ability even when controlling for baseline intelligence. Durrant and Ensom (2012) synthesized two decades of interdisciplinary research to show that spanking has no benefits and is consistently linked to negative developmental outcomes. More recently, Cuartas et al. (2021) found that spanking alters brain function in regions tied to emotional regulation and threat perception, supporting the argument that spanking is a neurological stressor akin to physical abuse. These findings are not isolated, they are part of a vast, global, multidisciplinary consensus that leaves no reasonable doubt about the harm.

Cuartas et al. (2021) took it a step further. Brain scans show that spanking activates the prefrontal cortex in the same way as more extreme physical abuse. Think about that: in the child’s brain, spanking and abuse are neurologically indistinguishable.

Afifi et al. (2017) showed that spanking meets criteria for classification as an ACE, an Adverse Childhood Experience. ACEs are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood and have been linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance use in adulthood. These include physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Children exposed to ACEs are more likely to struggle in school, engage in risky behaviors, and develop long-term health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and depression. Spanking, now shown to belong in this category, is not a benign disciplinary tactic, it is a biologically embedded stressor with lifelong consequences. Adverse Childhood Experience. These experiences, which include emotional neglect and household violence, are linked to lifelong outcomes like depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide.

But don’t take only the researchers' word for it. The American Academy of Pediatrics, UNICEF, WHO, and the CDC all agree: spanking is not just ineffective, it’s harmful.

And this isn’t merely a scientific consensus. It is a global human rights issue. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified by 196 out of 196 countries. Article 19 mandates that children be protected from "all forms of physical or mental violence... while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child."

This is as settled as science and ethics get. It’s not controversial. It’s just inconvenient for those who don’t want to give up the comfort of their own upbringing.

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Part II: Global Evidence

The myth that spanking works “better in some places” dies hard, but it dies nonetheless.

Studies across more than 62 countries, including work by Pace et al. (2019), Ward et al. (2021), Cuartas et al. (2022), and Wiggers and Paas (2022), show that spanking correlates with worse outcomes for children, across every continent and cultural context. Spanked children demonstrate more externalizing behaviors, poorer socioemotional development, and weaker academic performance. These results remain consistent regardless of a country’s legal stance or cultural normalization.

In fact, countries that ban corporal punishment often report lower societal violence, stronger school outcomes, and greater psychological well-being. The evidence holds globally, despite variations in race, class, religion, and parenting philosophy.

There is no culture in which pain magically becomes productive.

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Part III: The Myths We Cling To

Here is where science crashes against ego. Culture, after all, is the last refuge of the wrong-but-comfortable.

“I was spanked and turned out fine.”
No, you survived it. You got lucky. Survivorship bias isn’t a virtue, it’s an anecdote. If being harmed without visible scars is your bar for "fine," we have redefined trauma as resilience. That’s not a moral defense, it’s denial.

“You don’t have kids, so you don’t get a say.”
By that logic, you can't speak about war unless you’ve been shot. Expertise isn’t conferred by reproduction. It comes from data, analysis, and peer-reviewed consensus. The idea that parenthood makes you an expert in child psychology is as absurd as saying owning a car makes you a mechanic.

“Spanking isn’t abuse.”
Would it be abuse if done to a spouse? If so, why is it discipline when done to a child? The answer lies in power, not ethics. Spanking is non-consensual, fear-based, and administered by someone in complete control. Strip away the family dynamic, and it’s called assault.

“Spanking is okay sometimes.”
So is hitting your wife okay if she really made you mad? Do we teach that violence is situational? That the people you love are the ones you get to hit when they push your limits? Pain is not pedagogy. It’s just pain.

“I’m a parent. I know best.”
Then why does the data keep proving you wrong? Parenting doesn’t come with a PhD in developmental neuroscience. It comes with instincts, which, when unexamined, often mimic the very generational harm we claim to want to break.

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Part IV: Cycles and Consequences

The real damage of spanking isn’t what it does in the moment, it’s what longitudinal studies confirm it sets in motion across a lifespan. Research by Maguire-Jack et al. (2012) found that children spanked at age one were more likely to exhibit aggressive and externalizing behavior by age five. Similarly, Taylor et al. (2010) demonstrated that even minimal physical punishment at age three predicted increased aggression at age five. Barbaro et al. (2022) further underscore that these outcomes hold even when genetic and environmental confounds are controlled for, suggesting a direct and enduring impact. It’s what it programs into the long arc of a child’s development.

Children learn from repetition, not just of words, but of power dynamics. This is the core of Bandura’s social learning theory: children model the behaviors they observe, especially when those behaviors are reinforced by authority figures. When violence is used to enforce rules, it becomes part of the behavioral script they internalize. Similarly, Bowlby’s attachment theory suggests that secure attachment arises from consistent, safe caregiving. Introducing pain into that relationship, especially by those meant to protect, undermines trust and distorts a child’s foundational sense of security. The message they receive isn’t just that disobedience brings pain, but that love does too. When the person you trust most is the one who hits you, the wiring becomes confused. Love is mixed with fear. Authority becomes indistinguishable from violence. Discipline becomes indistinguishable from pain.

And those children grow up. Some will hit their own kids, convinced they turned out "fine." Some will grow into adults unable to regulate their emotions or escape relationships that mimic the control-and-submission of their youth. Some will just carry it in silence, chalking up the tightness in their chest or the explosion in their temper to something else entirely.

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Conclusion: No More Euphemisms

We don’t call it hitting because that would require us to confront ourselves. We don’t say 'assault' because that would call into question decades of parenting culture and legal complicity. Yet, even the law has begun to catch up. In the U.S., corporal punishment has been banned in public schools in 31 states and counting, while countries like Sweden outlawed it entirely as early as 1979. These aren’t radical shifts—they’re overdue acknowledgments of what the data and the damage have long made clear. We don’t call it abuse because that would implicate too many of our parents. So we say "discipline" and "spare the rod" and whatever else we must to keep from admitting that we have sanctioned violence against children for generations.

But here’s the bottom line: if you have to hurt someone to teach them a lesson, it’s not a lesson worth teaching. It is not noble. It is not old-school. It is not love with rough edges.

It is violence. Sanitized by culture, blessed by tradition, and discredited by science.

And it ends now.

References

Afifi, T. D., et al. (2017). Spanking and adult mental health impairment: The case for the designation of spanking as an ACE. Child Abuse & Neglect.

Barbaro, N., et al. (2022). The effects of spanking on psychosocial outcomes: Accounting for family-level, child-level, and genetic confounds. Developmental Psychology.

Cuartas, J., et al. (2021). Corporal punishment and elevated neural response to threat in children. Child Development.

Cuartas, J., et al. (2022). Estimating the association between spanking and early childhood development in 62 low- and middle-income countries. The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.

Durrant, J. E., & Ensom, R. (2012). Physical punishment of children: Lessons from 20 years of research. Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology.

Maguire-Jack, K., et al. (2012). Spanking and child externalizing behavior across the first decade of life. Child Abuse & Neglect.

Pace, G. T., et al. (2019). Spanking and young children’s socioemotional development in low- and middle-income countries. Child Abuse & Neglect.

Straus, M. A., & Paschall, M. J. (2009). Corporal punishment by mothers and development of children’s cognitive ability: A longitudinal study of two nationally representative age cohorts. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma.

Taylor, C. A., et al. (2010). Mothers’ spanking of 3-year-old children and subsequent risk of children’s aggressive behavior. Pediatrics.

UNICEF. (n.d.). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved from: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child