If your child attends a school in Alabama he or she can be subject to a paddling that
turns them black and blue.
Michaela Curtis went straight to the hospital and police when her son came home from school with dark bruises on his behind. But what she learned was the people who hurt her 7-year-old had every right to do so: They were his teachers.
Teachers in Alabama's public schools still have paddles. And whenever a child misbehaves, they can chose to apply that "board of education" to the "seat of learning." It is state law, and some 40,000 Alabama schoolchildren were paddled last school year.
Dark bruises on his behind. Is this one of those crazy laws from back in the 1800s that was never taken off of the books?
In 1995, Alabama lawmakers put the paddle in teachers' hands. The state passed legislation allowing corporal punishment in public schools, and gave local school boards wide discretion as to how and when the discipline should be administered.
[...]
Across the country, 23 states allow this type of discipline in public schools. Spanking is heaviest in the South, so much so, that psychologists who oppose spanking say it gives new meaning to the phrase "Bible Belt."
1995. It has been proven time and time again that corporal punishment, whether in the home or in school,
does nothing you want it to for the child:
Nearly 30 studies from various countries show that children who are regularly spanked become more aggressive. They are also more likely to be depressed or take drugs, even after correcting for other factors.
Smacking is effective in the short run: it stops children pulling their sisters’ hair. But in the long run it has all sorts of bad effects. A study in 20 American cities found that young children in homes with little or no spanking showed swifter cognitive development than their peers. Other studies find that children in physically punitive schools perform worse.
Even worse, parents have no recourse as a
result of the laws. Michaela Curtis learned how idiotic this law is first hand. She asked the police what they would do if
she had paddled her son, to which the officer said the child would have been taken out of her custody. She had also, the day before, made it clear to the school that she wanted no one giving her son corporal punishment, in any form.
But according to district policy, which is supported by state law, a Demopolis public school teacher can paddle a child, even when a parent says no. The school district superintendent, Wesley Hill, investigated the incident and concluded that the spanking was justified and Curtis had no case.
"A child can be spanked even after the parent expressly refuses to consent," Hill explains. "It's not an opt-out system."
The problem with laws like these is that people vote for them based on anecdotal evidence versus real scientific evidence.