Disciplinary Violence Research Articles

Unpolicing Childhood: Cultural Approaches to Anti-Child Disciplinary Violence in the Elementary Setting

Nineteenth century western beliefs about race and gender ushered in the concept of othering, in which non-white individuals were viewed and treated as subhuman and dangerous. Concurrently, the shifting concept of childhood buttressed the notion that innocence and purity were qualities most associated with and demonstrated by children from the dominant culture. As organizations tend to reflect societal values, beliefs and fears, school became a major institution designed to mold children into responsible and moral citizens. This symbolic social contract between society and school has come to reinforce childism--a form of oppression against children who have been othered. We assert that in schools, childism is evidenced as anti-Blackness and anti-Black child sexism. In this paper, we examine childism and share the narratives of Black elementary educators who resisted anti-Black childism and disrupted disciplinary violence in the elementary setting with cultural approaches.

The Swedish social services' police reporting and children's access to protection and support in child abuse cases: A quantitative content analysis

BackgroundThe UN Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits all forms of violence against children. Sweden was early in introducing a ban on disciplinary violence; however, difficulties have been noted in identifying children in need of protection and providing help for children exposed to violence. ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to explore the social services' police reporting and children's access to protection and support in cases of physical and sexual child abuse. MethodsThe sample consisted of 291 child welfare reports from three Swedish municipalities. Data were collected from child welfare reports, investigations, and child social records and analyzed using quantitative content analysis. ResultsA majority of the cases, including cases with a high indication for police reporting, were not reported to the police by the social services. Although the child in 60.1 % of cases provided information about violence, 70.7 % of all child welfare investigations were completed without support measures, and only 8.2 % led to protection or support linked to violence. Children's participation was limited, suggesting inadequate conditions for children's access to protection and support. ConclusionsChildren's right to protection against violence requires the recognition of children as active participants with access to safe participation. Failure to report suspected crimes against children risks minimizing acts of violence or making violence invisible. Difficulties in handling conflicts of interest between children and parents risk neither protection nor support being provided for the child.

Living Death at the Intersection of Necropower and Disciplinary Power: A Qualitative Exploration of Racialised and Detained Groups in Australia

This article challenges state-sponsored violence in Australia by exploring the experiences of young Indigenous people in youth detention and refugees in immigration detention in Australia as a form of living death. This article examines how this living death manifests by qualitatively analysing publicly accessible first-hand accounts from Indigenous young people about their experiences of youth imprisonment and from refugees about their experiences of immigration detention onshore and offshore. The findings suggest that when necropower and disciplinary power intersect four overlapping expressions of violence emerge: structural violence, epistemic violence, physical violence and brutality, and disciplinary violence. It is the complex overlapping of these multiple forms of harm that creates an experience of living death. In privileging the voices of young Indigenous people and refugees, this article also recognises their continued refusal of past and present colonial structures and the associated violence of carceral spaces.

Test of the Serotonin Transporter Gene × Early Life Stress Interaction Effect on Subjective Well‐Being and Loneliness Among Japanese Young Adults

AbstractThis study investigated whether aspects of early life environment (quality of parental relationship, frequency of parental violence including disciplinary violence, amount of parental attention, and family income during childhood) would affect one's subjective well‐being and loneliness later in life (i.e., during young adulthood). This study also investigated whether the negative influence of early life stress is greater among individuals with the SS genotype of the serotonin transporter‐linked polymorphic region (5‐HTTLPR) in the serotonin transporter gene. Participants were 568 university students whose genotypes were identified using nail samples. They reported their current levels of subjective well‐being and loneliness as well as their recollections of their early family environments. The results showed that less stressful early life environments, such as high levels of parents' relationship quality and parental attention, were positively (negatively) associated with subjective well‐being (loneliness), while frequent parental violence was negatively (positively) associated with subjective well‐being (loneliness). Nevertheless, the gene × environment interaction effects were consistently non‐significant—the SS genotype did not accentuate the effects of early life stress.

Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine

AbstractThis article examines the strategies, structures, and practices that allowed for the emergence of communities without police institutions during two Palestinian uprisings, the 1936–39 revolt and the 1987–91 intifada. For each period, the article identifies efforts to disengage from and disempower the state police, to establish alternative systems of anticolonial justice, and to employ disciplinary violence to serve the imperatives and enforce the decisions of Palestinian nationalist bodies. In particular, Palestinian systems of anticolonial justice drew on communal reconciliation (sulh) and other preexisting local iterations of communal justice. These local forms relied on discourses of egalitarianism and consensus, which produced stability in periods of upheaval but also obscured the inequalities they reproduced. Ultimately, the anticolonial structures that Palestinians established proved unable to withstand intense internal and external pressure, and some elements of the coercive forces that served them were absorbed into state police institutions.

Are Children With a Number of Disabilities and Long-Term Illnesses at Increased Risk of Mental Violence, Disciplinary Violence, and Serious Violence?

The focus of this study was on the question of whether or not children with a number of disabilities and long-term illnesses are at increased risk of child maltreatment (mental violence, disciplinary violence, and serious violence). This study was based on the Child Victim Survey of 2013 (FSD2943). The data consist of a nationally representative sample of pupils in Finland in sixth grade (12-13 years of age) and ninth grade (15-16 years of age). The sampling was undertaken as a stratified cluster by province, municipality type, and school size. The total number of respondents was 11,364. According to the logistic regression analyses, the children with at least three disabilities or long-term illnesses had an increased risk of violence compared with children with no disability: The risk of mental violence increased by 2.96 times, the risk of disciplinary violence by 4.30 times, and the risk of serious violence by 3.53 times. The effect of the category of at least three disabilities and illnesses remained statistically significant, although the analysis also accounted for several confounding factors. Thus, a child's multiple morbidity (in the case of three or more disabilities and illnesses) can be categorized as one of the major risk factors for child maltreatment. The study complements the results of previous studies concerning the effect of children's disabilities and long-term illnesses and their impact on child maltreatment. The results underline the importance of employees of health and social care having knowledge of multiple morbidity and its importance as a key factor regarding child maltreatment.

Punitive Violence against Children: A Psychoeducational Parenting Program to Reduce Harsh Disciplining Practices and Child Beating in the Home.

.While parental harsh disciplining of children is a global concern, children living in Nigeria often experience particularly high levels of harsh discipline. Constrained by the lack of parenting skills to effectively manage children, most Nigerian parents rely too heavily on the use of violent methods in the disciplining of their children, which poses a huge threat to their well-being and development. Given the high levels of harsh parenting and the lack of understanding of its harms, we set out to develop a program of intervention called Psychoeducational parenting program to prevent violence against children (PEPVAC), guided by psychological principles of social learning theory, to help parents reverse the trend. We tested the effectiveness of the program using a quasi-experimental design with questionnaire and observation as data collection tools. Participants were 300 parents of children age 3-12 years, who endorsed using harsh discipline. Parents (n = 150) who received the 8-week intervention were compared with parents in the control group (n = 150). A mixed-model ANOVA revealed that the PEPVAC parents demonstrated a reduced use of harsh disciplinary tactics and a decreased incidence of parents beating their children compared to parents in the control group who continued with business-as-usual. Findings suggest that PEPVAC can be a useful intervention tool in the prevention of punitive violence against children, especially in a culturally-oriented country like Nigeria with over 91 million population of children who are at risk of disciplinary violence in the home.

Overcoming ‘Minimal Objectivity’ and ‘Inherent Bias’: Ethics and Understandings of Feminist Research in a Health Sciences Faculty in South Africa

One day, three feminist academics from different disciplinary backgrounds met over coffee on a health sciences campus. Keen to work collectively with medical students, they devised a four-week special study module (SSM) called ‘Intersecting Identities’ that combined a variation of Photovoice, a participatory action research method, with seminars on gender, ‘race’, class, sexual orientation, and other identities. The end results would include a photo exhibition open to the university community, and a portfolio of student’s work. Inherent in the SSM were tenets of feminist research and disciplinary curiosity encouraged by the field of medical and health humanities (MHH). In seeking ethics approval for the SSM, the shared challenges linked to feminist research and cross-disciplinary work in MHH was revealed. The ethics committee suggested that the SSM was ‘inherently biased’ and that there was ‘evidence of minimal objectivity, which is not what research demands’. This article contextualises the SSM in relation to the medical curriculum and the nascent field of MHH and then analyses the committee’s objections and the authors’ replies to them. A discourse analysis and examination of this correspondence provides insights into a case study of inherent epistemic disciplinary violence, pedagogical clashes, notions of ‘risk’ in research, and the long road towards epistemic generosity and reciprocity.

Child Welfare’s Decision-making Process in Cases of Disciplinary Violence

Disciplinary violence against children is banned by law in Finland. According to the Finnish Criminal Code, acts of disciplinary violence are judged as assault. However, previous research has shown that authorities often find it difficult to identify cases of disciplinary violence and to intervene in them. The objective of this article is to examine the decision-making process in child welfare in suspected cases of disciplinary violence. The reasoning and arguments of social workers on which they based their decisions were analysed. Also, the measures taken were analysed, specifically whether a request for criminal investigation had been made to the police. The analysis was based on child welfare documents of one Finnish municipality from the year 2011. It was found that the decision-making process of social workers followed three pathways, resulting in two-thirds of the cases not leading to a request for criminal investigation to the police.

‘Crime or not?’ – police officers' perceptions of disciplinary violence, its criminalisation and its investigation

Disciplinary violence against children is banned by law in Finland. According to the Finnish Criminal Code, acts of disciplinary violence fall under the category of assault. In most cases, disciplinary violence fulfils at least the essential elements of petty assault. Despite these efforts, disciplinary violence is still prevalent. Previous research has also shown that authorities find it difficult to identify cases of disciplinary violence and intervene in them. Moreover, it has been found that the police culture and police officers' interpretations of policing influence police officers' attitudes and actions. Thus, the objective of this article is to examine what police officers specialised in investigating crimes against children think about the criminalisation of disciplinary violence, how they perceive disciplinary violence and whether, in their opinion, cases of disciplinary violence require a crime process. It also examines how these police officers perceive the investigation of suspected cases of disciplinary violence. The study was conducted by semi-structured focus interviews face-to-face with 12 police officers in Finland. It was found that disciplinary violence and its criminalisation provoked different opinions among the police officers. Despite their own opinions, however, the police officers knew that it was their role to investigate these cases. It was also found that, at least to some extent, police officers' perceptions of disciplinary violence are related to their actions in practice.

Can we Conquer Child Abuse if we don’t Outlaw Physical Chastisement of Children?

Initially, this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the 17thispcan International Congress held in Hong Kong in 2008. It addresses the question: Can we conquer child abuse if we don’t first outlaw physical punishment of children? It is argued that children’s low status in society and children’s less than optimal development are inextricably linked to corporal punishment in childhood, as is the physical abuse of children that all too frequently begins as disciplinary violence, often euphemistically described as “smacking”, but tragically escalates, resulting in injuries and even death. Attention is drawn to increasing evidence from research around the world that reveals the futility and avoidable negative consequences of physical chastisement, and the paper ends on an optimistic note foreseeing the end of the corporal punishment of children in Asia and elsewhere – a world in which children’s rights are respected and children’s childhoods are freed from the pain and fear of disciplinary violence.

Neutralizing Disciplinary Violence: A Typology of Parents’ Use-of-Violence Accounts

Disciplinary violence is banned by law in Finland, and acts of disciplinary violence fall under the category of assault. This article analyzes the accounts and justifications that parents give to justify disciplinary violence against their children. The analysis is based on child welfare documents, reports of crimes, and pretrial investigation documents from 2011. Drawing upon the techniques of neutralization and the idea of accounts, the accounts of parents are found to be split in four distinctive (yet overlapping) types which include aspects of denying either victimization or the act as such or appealing to the necessity of the forbidden act.

Revealing Racial Purity Ideology

Purpose: In this article, I explore White racial purity desire as an underexamined ideology that might help us understand the compulsion of disciplinary violence against Black boys in U.S. public schools. By pointing to the dearth of research on sexual desire as a site of racial conflict and through revisiting Civil Rights–era fears about interracial intimacy between Black men and White women, I encourage readers to consider if and to what extent fears about sexual desires remain in the fabric of our school and social lives. Proposed Conceptual Argument: I argue that in schools, White-supremacist patriarchy reproduces normative Whiteness through the continual surveillance, punishment, distancing, and removal of primarily heteronormative Black male bodies, locating its justification in protecting the bodily safety and academic achievement of heteronormative White girls. I suggest that in predominantly White desegregated schools, disciplining heteronormative Black boys represents a new policy-based campaign of institutionalized violence and intimidation that reflects a subtle, but nonetheless pernicious, White male segregationist agenda. Implications: Considering fear/desire of interracial intimacy as a lens, alongside economic and political explanations of resistance to desegregation, provides a more complete analytical framework to comprehend racial conflict and segregationism in contemporary school settings. Our collective failure to acknowledge and interrogate the ways schools produce Whiteness by seeking to protect White girls from Black boys ensures Black boys’ bodies and minds will continue to be unfairly subjected to the violence of harsh and disproportionate disciplinary measures.

Balancing Between Social Work and Prosecution

Disciplinary violence is a type of a crime that still is not always perceived as a crime and perceptions of the severity and ‘educational’ nature of the acts still may affect authority decision making. This is not indifferent as pre-trial investigation carried out by the police has a crucial impact on how suspicions of crime proceed in the criminal process, especially when it comes to suspicions of violence against children. During pre-trial investigation, the police affect what kind of a case is being ‘constructed’ as a crime and, thus, affect what we perceive as a crime. This process of ‘defining’ what constitutes a crime is very meaningful especially when considering crimes like disciplinary violence that have not traditionally been considered as forbidden. Based on Finnish reports of crime to the police and pre-trial investigation documents from the year 2011, this research examines, first, what kind of typical suspicions of disciplinary violence come to the attention of the police and, second, how these suspicions have proceeded. The analysis shows that a typical suspicion of disciplinary violence is reported to the police by a social worker or the other parent, and that slightly less than two-thirds of the cases had been sent to a prosecutor. However, from the point of view of due process and equal treatment of children, the analysis yields alarming findings in the sense of very diverse policies of police departments and individual investigators in dealing with suspicions of disciplinary violence.

Are Children with Disabilities and Long-term Illnesses at Increased Risk of Disciplinary Violence?

This study examined the association between disability status and the risk of disciplinary violence at the hands of parents. The data consist of a nationally representative sample of 12–13 and 15–16-year-old Finnish school children (n = 13,459). These representative data were collected by the Police College of Finland. The results show that having a visual impairment, mental health problems, learning and/or memory difficulties, or another chronic illness, such as asthma, is associated with an increased risk of disciplinary violence. Children with multiple disabilities were significantly more likely to be targets of disciplinary violence. These findings suggest that children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to maltreatment.

Violence between parents and children: courts of law in early modern Finland

This article studies the attitudes and significance of violence between parents and children as they appear in court records of lower courts and Courts of Appeal in early modern Finland. The paper discusses four kinds of violence: 1) the deliberate killing of children by their parents, 2) neglect of children or their upbringing by the parents and 3) physical or verbal violence by the children towards their parents. These were categories of forbidden violence between parents and children. Fourthly, 4) this paper discusses instances when violence was considered legal and even accepted, the so-called disciplinary violence committed by parents against their children. The important concepts in talking about violence are codes of honour and social hierarchy, the emphasis placed on social order and peace in society. The importance of peace and order emerge particularly when discussing concealment and publicity, responsibility and guilt, as well as of hierarchy. Emotional considerations seem to have been extremely important in violence between parents and children.

‘It was good to learn how to show affection’: Central American men who reject hypermasculinity

To understand why some men ‘reproduce’ socially legitimated violence in their relations with other men, women, children and sub-alterns, and some do not, it is necessary to go beyond structural accounts to an understanding of the dynamics through which cultural demands, environmental constraints and socialisation shape subjectivity. This is an exploratory study of a small sample of men, who reject the use of disciplinary violence towards children and differ from the ‘hegemonic’ hypermasculine norm in other domains. Attention is drawn to the critical role of attachment experiences in enabling men to reject violence as a normative practice. These experiences appear to have galvanised these men's capacity to accurately interpret their own mental states and those of others.

Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre

Is Jane the of shame? Would such a reframing of the character famously dubbed the heroine of fulfillment constitute its own shamefully conduct?1 Widely understood as a model of engaging and empowered female voice, Jane Eyre's distinctive I has often seemed bolstered, especially, by the emotional display and pull of that voice. Not just feeling, but specific feelings have captured critical attention, with anger and attaining pride of place in feminist assessments of Bronte's novel and of novelistic feeling in both Victorian and contemporary culture. From Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential reading of Jane Eyre's anger as exemplary of rebellious feminism to more recent critiques of the normalizing triumph of sympathy staged by the novel's end, the fraught yet potent agency, self-assertion, and emotional invitation of Jane Eyre's autobiographical narrative, and especially her voice, have been understood to thrive on anger or sympathy.2 Yet what are we to make of that emotion which inspires the first diegetic mention of Jane Eyre's surname and punctuates her physical imprisonment in the metaphorically rich red-room as a young girl For shame! shame! . . . What shocking conduct, Eyre (9)? This cry for suggests that shame constitutes both an introduction of Miss Eyre to the reader and an interpellation of Jane into the contours of gendered interiority and social relations. We might imagine it as the invasive voice of society threatening to repress the more authentic self-expression of the angry Jane, or, perhaps, as an affective force imposed from outside the individual that exposes the disciplinary violence inflicted by all emotions, even those seemingly more personal and salutary

Discipline, compassion and monastic ideals of community, c.950–1250

This essay examines the intersections of discipline, compassion and community in a selection of monastic texts from the late tenth through to the mid-thirteenth centuries, focusing on disciplinary rituals involving punitive flogging or flagellation. Although members of all of the major religious orders viewed flogging as a necessary method of correction needing little or no justification, as evidenced by customaries, letters, and even miracle collections, few scholars have examined the role of this practice in the shaping of monastic culture. This essay suggests that disciplinary rituals served a number of related functions within coenobitic monasticism: they reinforced hierarchies within communities, tested individuals' mastery of the virtues of humility and obedience, expressed superiors' compassion and love for their subordinates, and reminded penitents and spectators alike of Christ's bodily suffering. These conclusions are further supported by a close reading of Peter the Venerable's vita of the Cluniac prior Matthew of Albano, a text which depicts disciplinary violence as a synthetic element of monastic life, as well as a ritual means of promoting the spiritual growth of individuals and entire communities.

“Rough Mens” in “the Toughest Places I Ever Seen”: The Construction and Ramifications of Black Masculine Identity in the Mississippi Delta's Levee Camps, 1900–1935

This article examines the “levee camp” as a social and cultural site for reconstituting rural black workers' masculine identities in the early twentieth-century Mississippi-Arkansas Delta. The construction of the Mississippi River's levees during this period depended heavily on the labor of black mule-drivers drawn from the Delta's cotton plantations. In spite of this dependency, the levee camps' exploitative commissaries and harsh disciplinary violence quashed workers' efforts to reclaim a sense of autonomy that was increasingly denied them on the region's plantations. However, partly in response to the perceived erosion of their authority within the sharecropper family, levee workers successfully used the notorious after-hours culture of the levee camps to construct a hyper-masculine image of themselves as “rough mens” who had been to the levee camps, enjoyed the sexual attention of camp women, and were manly enough to survive the murderous violence of white bosses and other “rough mens” alike. Using a series of 1930s labor investigations as well as early Delta blues hollers and songs about the levee camps, this article shows how black workers' efforts to cultivate this hyper-masculine levee worker image ultimately proved detrimental to their class interests. Levee contractors and foremen welcomed levee camp gambling, prostitution, drinking, and fighting as ways of reducing workers' wages and maintaining labor control in the camps. Ultimately, the levee camps provide a useful example of an all-male work site where gender had important, if unintended, ramifications for workers' class position.