Spanking has declined in America, study finds, but pediatricians worry about impact of pandemic
Photos: A history of spanking
Who invented spanking? Christians point to Proverbs 13:24: "Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him." However, Olivier Maurel, a retired French teacher author, said the practice appears to be universal in history: "From Sumer to Egypt to China, from ancient India to pre-Columbian America, from Athens to Rome, children were hit," he wrote.
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Photos: A history of spanking
A whipping or "cobbing" was also historically used as a punishment for adults. This etching shows Bishop of London Edmund Bonner punishing a heretic in "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" from 1563. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Bonner was characterized as a monster who enjoyed burning Protestants at the stake during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, who was known as "Bloody Mary."
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Photos: A history of spanking
The tools of spanking are varied. In this vintage image, a man uses a paddle. For adults administering punishment, the use of switches, belt straps, paddles and the like delivered increased punishment while saving their hands from the sting of the swat.
In the slave trade, there was a crueler reason for the use of a paddle or strap. In his book "Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present Time," the Rev. William Cooper explains that straps were used to keep from scarring slaves and reducing their value: "It is said that with this instrument a slave could be punished to within an inch of his life, and yet come out with no visible injury, and with his skin as smooth as a peeled onion."
In the slave trade, there was a crueler reason for the use of a paddle or strap. In his book "Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present Time," the Rev. William Cooper explains that straps were used to keep from scarring slaves and reducing their value: "It is said that with this instrument a slave could be punished to within an inch of his life, and yet come out with no visible injury, and with his skin as smooth as a peeled onion."
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Photos: A history of spanking
Spanking reaches across many races and cultures. Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying corporal punishment for 15 years, said research shows that spanking is more common among African-Americans than among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans.
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Photos: A history of spanking
An 1879 drawing from "Cole's Funny Picture Book," one of many created by Australian E.W. Cole, billed as the "Cheapest Child's Picture Book ever published." The drawing illustrates "the macabre Snooks' Patent whipping machine for flogging na