Invisible wounds: Corporal punishment in British schools as a form of ritual

Abstract

This article examines a presumed historical association between corporal punishment and the British “ruling class,” taking as data the elaborate forms of beating practiced at a well-known English fee-paying boarding school in the 1950s and here documented in detail. Analogies with other forms of ritual studied by anthropologists are considered, as well as the psychosexual dynamics of beating for both officiants and victims. The paper argues that ritual corporal punishment must be seen in retrospect as a clear case of child abuse that is both physical and sexual. Such rituals of authority, though virtually abolished in Britain, may well exist in a different form in present day residential institutions for children in some Third World countries that have borrowed from now outdated European practices.