School Corporal Punishment - Geographical Scope

Geographical Scope

Corporal punishment used to be prevalent in schools in many parts of the world, but in recent decades it has been outlawed in most of Europe and in Canada, Japan, South Africa, New Zealand and several other countries (see list of countries, below). It remains commonplace in a number of countries in Africa, south-east Asia and the Middle East (see list of countries, below). In the United States, the Supreme Court ruling in Ingraham v. Wright (1977) held that school corporal punishment does not violate the "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" clause of the federal Constitution, because that clause applies only to the prison system. The Supreme Court of the United States has not yet judged the practice under other federal law or other Constitutional clauses. Paddling continues to be used to a significant extent in a number of Southern states, though there has been a sharp decline in its incidence over the past 20 years.

In some Asian and African countries where it has been theoretically outlawed, it is still used in practice.

Much of the traditional culture that surrounds corporal punishment in school, at any rate in the English-speaking world, derives largely from British practice in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly as regards the caning of teenage boys. There is a vast amount of literature on this, in both popular and serious culture. Britain itself outlawed the practice in 1987 for state schools and more recently for all schools.

Many schools in Singapore and Malaysia use caning (for boys) as a routine official punishment for misconduct, as also some African countries. In some Middle Eastern countries whipping is used. In South Korea, male and female secondary students alike are commonly spanked in school. (See list of countries, below.)

In most of continental Europe, school corporal punishment has been banned for several decades, much longer in certain countries. As a formal deliberate ceremony, it seems to have been more common in northern/Protestant countries of Germanic culture than in southern/Catholic countries of Latin culture. Caning was not completely abolished until 1967 in Denmark and 1983 in Germany. (See list of countries, below.)

From the 1917 revolution onwards, corporal punishment was outlawed in Russia and the Soviet Union, because it was deemed contrary to Soviet ideology. Soviet visitors to western schools would express shock at its use. Other communist regimes followed suit: for instance, corporal punishment remains outlawed in present-day North Korea and in mainland China. Meanwhile, communists in other countries such as Britain took the lead in campaigning against school corporal punishment, which they claimed was a symptom of the decadence of capitalist education systems.