When the Spankings Stopped
I don’t think it’ll be any great surprise to learn that I grew up in the era of corporal punishment. It’s my impression that in other areas it had already faded out of popularity, at least when it came to schools. In southern Tennessee, though, no such truce had been called. Spankings were regularly a part of the punishment protocol both in the elementary school and the high school I attended. In elementary school, it was the first line of defense against bad behavior. In high school, students were presented with a choice. They could either serve detention or accept being paddled by the vice principal.
I’d like to take a moment to note here that I have long suspected my vice principal got off on this practice. He owned several paddles, at least two of which had to have come from a sex shop of some kind. They were plexiglass with holes drilled through them of varying sizes. He said this was to help him pick up speed. My mother always insisted that he likely made those paddles, but that assumes not only that he was handy with tools, which she said he was, but also that he knew how to work with plexiglass and how to attach it to a comfortable handle. Those paddles never looked homemade to me, and being a teacher’s kid, I saw them up close on more than one occasion.
More than that, he had a Bible verse taped to his desk that he made students read aloud before every strike. I have no idea what that was meant to accomplish aside from humiliating students past what spanking them alone already provided. To me, if further humiliation was the point, that’s not only clearly abuse, but likely linked to his own sexual hang ups.
Those suspicions aside, if parents didn’t want their children paddled, they had to opt out of that practice. There was no permission slip for it sent home. Those parents had to go to the school and specifically ask for the form to prevent their kids from being hit by our frankly creepy vice principal. It was the default that the option would remain on the table.
All of this was happening in the early 2000’s. There was already research available showing that corporal punishment is not effective and has negative outcomes in the long run. A few of the kids whose parents refused to let them be spanked in school pointed this out, and it earned them the ire of administration in the school pretty quickly. It’s not that the school didn’t know the research existed. They didn’t want us to know it.
I say all of that to establish that while I personally think there’s never an excuse for hitting children, regardless of how longstanding the practice, it was absolutely commonplace where and when I grew up. I was never spanked at school, save for by my mother. I was spanked at home, at least for a while.
For the first sixteen years of my childhood, my mom was basically a single mother. My dad was in the picture, but he worked a third shift factory job that meant we only saw him over the weekend. My mom and I largely had an uneasy ceasefire established pretty early on. While she was absolutely abusive in a number of other ways, she’d also seen enough truly troubled kids working at the local high school to have some perspective on my behavior. My dad would hear about my grades or some small infraction and insist I be grounded or spanked for it. My mother would either tell him she’d already spanked me or would let me know that I was “grounded” when he was home. She absolutely demeaned and starved me on a consistent basis, and I’m not erasing that fact. Still, her disdain for my father’s attempts to come home and be a disciplinarian to a kid he didn’t know did save me a lot of pain. During the period that my parents were still spanking me, I can count on one hand the number of times she actually did it. To her, while I did need to be punished for misbehavior, if I wasn’t drinking, doing drugs, pregnant, or failing any classes, I was doing okay.
Occasionally, I would misbehave on a day that my father was home. While I can remember exactly what I’d done wrong when my mother spanked me, I cannot remember any of my wrongdoings when it comes to my father. With him, it felt entirely random. Anything I said or did could be enough for him to want to hit me, and it never aligned with what my mother thought warranted the same punishment.
My father had a different method than my mother did. Every time he spanked me, he screamed at me to stop crying or he would keep going. Every time, I tried to stop crying and failed, only making him more angry. Looking back on it as an adult, my response as a child makes a lot of sense. A father I barely knew came home for a weekend with standards that had never been explained to me, demanding strict adherence to them nonetheless. When I inevitably failed, he beat me. It was a no-win situation, and crying about the cruelty of that is a natural response. For my father, it was an easy excuse to continue taking his anger out on me long past the point of correction.
At some point, around the time I was ten years old, I decided that the next time my father spanked me I wouldn’t cry. I was determined to finally follow instructions and not let a single sound out of my mouth as best as I could. I believed him when he said it was my fault that he continued hitting me. I believed that my crying was the problem, and not his anger. I was wrong.
When the day finally came and I successfully made it through probably the worst spanking I’d ever received without crying, my father announced that spankings no longer worked for me and that they’d need to come up with something else. At first, I felt like I’d won. Despite the bruises I had the next day, I’d finally managed to do what he’d told me all along, and it had ended the spankings for good. He wasn’t going to hit me anymore. I was finally free of that punishment. Unfortunately, my father was ex-military, and he had something far worse in mind.
The next time my father punished me, he followed through on his promise. He didn’t spank me. He instead switched to stress positions. That first night, I was made to hold a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in the flat of my palm with my arms outstretched until my father said I could drop them. I was standing in front of the bookshelf, facing my parents, who were seated on the couch in the living room. They were both laughing as my arms started to shake, admonishing me when I tried to grip the books with my fingers. When my arms dropped, they made me start over again. This repeated several times before I was allowed to go to bed.
After that, they had me do wall sits. When it turned out that I could hold the position for a fair amount of time, my parents started piling books onto my lap until I finally collapsed, laughing like it was a game of Jenga. When I started again, I had to do so with those books already present.
Years later, when my parents had given up on physical punishments altogether, largely because I rarely did anything to warrant them, I finally realized the cruelty of those punishments. It was 2008, and I was a senior in high school. I was watching the news to complete an assignment for my journalism class. One of the segments that evening was about an upcoming documentary on Abu Ghraib. As the newscaster read out the definition of stress positions for the audience, a puzzle piece clicked down inside my head.
I’d had moments like these before. A news story about parents being arrested for forcing their children to exercise until they were vomiting and too weak to move had already rung several bells for me, and I knew that things at home were much worse than my parents would have people believe. I wasn’t ready to call them abusive quite yet, but seeing my childhood experience in an on-air discussion about torture reframed that part of my life in vivid color. For the first time, I heard the phrase “the cruelty is the point” and it hit me square in the chest. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that maybe it hadn’t been my fault. Maybe there was nothing I could have done wrong enough to warrant that punishment.
What I didn’t know then was that there’s a difference between child abuse and child torture. Causing your child physical pain purely for the joy of hurting them isn’t abuse. It’s torture. Even now, that framing feels both surreal and absolutely accurate. When I think about the fawning response the community at large gave my parents for their contributions, my mind immediately goes to that first night I was forced into a stress position, watching their faces as they sat eating snacks and laughing, how they giggled as they put those giant books back in my hands. It flashes against the image of my mother in her classroom and my father leading a community fitness event, the faces they showed the world against the faces I saw as my muscles buckled and drooped. I can see now that their abuse had nothing to do with me. The cruelty was the point. I was simply the easiest target.
