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Is corporal punishment the way to go?
Corporal punishment definitely has a dampening effect on self-esteem on its victims. Humiliation and helplessness are related to impaired self-esteem and physically punishing students makes them feel both helpless and humiliated.Sazda Lamichhane
Corporal punishment definitely has a dampening effect on self-esteem on its victims. Humiliation and helplessness are related to impaired self-esteem and physically punishing students makes them feel both helpless and humiliated.
I was physically punished by my teachers too and it is sad that almost everyone has gone through similar experiences during their school years. There are millions of kids who get abused by their teachers every day who definitely do not deserve it. Those kids grow up with psychological and behavioural problems, and all other kinds of issues which could have been avoided if they were not abused in their childhood—a period where you’re the most vulnerable and need love, care, and support along with supervision and guidance. Nobody deserves to get beaten for mistakes that everybody makes as a human. Teachers are supposed to make them realise their fault and correct it in a proper way.
In most cases, the victim deals with a lot of issues and realises that what happened to them was wrong. But in some cases, the former victim becomes the assailant. Using corporal punishment on kids makes them think that it’s okay to use violence to solve problems. In addition, teachers serve the role of caregivers to students and if students are humiliated and neglected by individuals who they perceive as caregivers, they will end up humiliating other individuals if the roles were reversed. Since they were brought up in an environment where they were physically punished for doing something wrong, they will use the same tactic to teach discipline to someone else—it could be their kids or someone else’s but the cycle of abuse keeps running circles.
Corporal punishment is a form of abuse and we have to stop abusing students to “correct” their behavior. In reality, corporal punishment does not correct student’s behaviour at all. All it does is create more problems. Adolescents who have experienced abuse might suffer from depression, anxiety, or social withdrawal. Psychiatric disorders are often seen in adolescents who have been abused.
In addition, adolescents who live in violent situations tend to run away to what they perceive to be safer environments. They engage in risky behaviour such as smoking, drinking alcohol, early sexual activity, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, gang involvement, and carrying guns. Studies show that individuals who were physically punished in their early adolescence were likely to resort to criminal activities later in their lives.
Figures with higher authorities tend to resort to physical punishment for mistakes that can be corrected through other methods. They may be doing this because that was how they were treated when they were students. But thrashing a student or using any form of physical punishment for their mistakes is unjustifiable, no matter what their mistake is. Parents send their children to school so that they get good education, not punishments. Schools should ban corporal punishment as a way of correcting behaviors and should impose strict rules for teachers and administrative staffs so that the children do not get abused and do not have to deal with any further problems as a result of corporal punishments.
Lamichhane is an A-level student at GEMS