Shaken Baby Syndrome: Theoretical and Evidential Controversies. Although the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse is drawn initially by CPS and only sometimes and subsequently in a judicial proceeding, the practice required by and principles underlying these rules ought to apply throughout the process. Appellate court judges in particular seem to be inclined toward privileging parents rights above harm to the child, as they are more likely, certainly more so than CPS professionals, to interpret a statutory requirement of physical injury or serious physical injury to require egregious harm or damage to the child. Third, as a practical matter, most parents do not have the knowledge or resources necessary to prove the standard proposed below, particularly the second prong: that the corporal punishment at issue does not cause functional impairment. For example, some jurisdictions with both extensive non-conforming immigrant communities and the political will and resources to work to reconcile those practices with broader community norms and applicable law have incorporated sensitivity to cultural difference in their CPS protocols and have trained their professionals accordingly. 2021 Jul;117:105089. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105089. The paper emphasizes the need for child protection professionals to understand parents' perspectives and acknowledge the importance of parents' religious beliefs. In contrast, basing the normativeness finding on the parents particular community would assure that the finding is consistent with the childs point of viewand thus a better predictor of functional impairmentbut only so long as the child is too young to be or does not choose to be a member of the broader community and a beneficiary of its different norms. An official website of the United States government. The Effect of Personal Characteristics on Reporting Child Maltreatment. direct physical harm, sometimes resulting in severe damage, long-term disability or death; mental ill-health, including behavioural and anxiety disorders, depression, hopelessness, low self-esteem, self-harm and suicide attempts, alcohol and drug dependency, hostility and emotional instability, which continue into adulthood; impaired cognitive and socio-emotional development, specifically emotion regulation and conflict solving skills; damage to education, including school dropout and lower academic and occupational success; poor moral internalization and increased antisocial behaviour; adult perpetration of violent, antisocial and criminal behaviour; indirect physical harm due to overloaded biological systems, including developing cancer, alcohol-related problems, migraine, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and obesity that continue into adulthood; increased acceptance and use of other forms of violence; and. Child Physical Abuse and Corporal Punishment. This blog post is sponsored by BetterHelp, but all opinions are our own., Counseing.info may receive compensation from BetterHelp or other sources if you purchase products or services through the links provided on this page., 2023 Copyright Therapists.com. In contrast with the nuanced and paradoxical effects of mild corporal punishment, corporal punishment that is cruel or severe has been found in multiple studies to have deleterious consequences. Code 300 (2006). The term, adapted from the medical sciences, refers to short- or long-term or permanent impairment of emotional or physical functioning in tasks of daily living.12 (Currently, most states maltreatment definitions prohibit practices and injuries that may lead to functional impairment. Storming the Castle to Save the Children: The Ironic Costs of a Child Welfare Exception to the Fourth Amendment. King AR, Kuhn SK, Strege C, Russell TD, Kolander T. Child Abuse Negl. Dodge and Doriane Lambelet Coleman with a county CPS frontline investigator, Durham County, N.C. (Feb. 16, 2009) (on file with L & CP); interview by Kenneth A. The state, on the other hand, could more easily marshal this evidence given its expertise; furthermore, the evidence would mostly be reusable in its other and future cases. When a norm has been established by the jury over a series of cases, judges may decline in future similar cases to submit the question to another jury on the ground that the matter has been amply settled. Cultural Norms for Adult Corporal Punishment of Children and Societal Rates of Endorsement and Use of Violence. Other states have similar statutes. Very Well The second involved a series of interviews with CPS professionals, including CPS directors, supervisors, and frontline social workers in counties in several states across the country. 1989); This inclination is consistent with recent moves in some jurisdictions to classify all physical discipline of children under a certain age as per se unreasonable. These two paradigms together should govern the development of the operative legal definitions and process because, separately and at times in combination, they are the approaches currently used by the relevant legal actors. Although immediate symptoms may be minimal, over weeks the infant may develop irritability, lethargy, tremors, vomiting, retinal detachment, and seizures, and in some situations, may even lapse into a coma or die. A problem in the implementation of the normativeness criterion is that the frequency and tolerance of corporal-punishment practices varies across jurisdictions, cultural groups, and time. For example, New York explicitly includes excessive corporal punishment within its statutory-neglect definition.33 Thus, it defines an abused child as one who suffers physical injury by other than accidental means which causes or creates a substantial risk of death, or serious or protracted disfigurement, or protracted impairment of physical or emotional health or protracted loss or impairment of the function of bodily organ.34 And it classifies as neglected a child whose physical condition has been impaired or harmed, but not injured seriously enough to create a substantial risk of death or protracted disfigurement or impairment.35 Other states adopting this approach have done so either informally or by administrative regulation. At the same time, we suggest that these costs are worth bearing if they can fix the problems inherent in the current process, specifically its tendency to produce inconsistent and erroneous outcomes. Additionally, and again regardless of the constitutional status of the right to use corporal punishment, most child-maltreatment investigations implicate constitutional limits on state searches and seizures, including the requirement that the state establish a likelihood of maltreatment before it intervenes.200 Second, most CPS investigations result in a finding of no maltreatment. College students (N = 1,136) provided retrospective self-reports regarding their history of aggression and levels of exposure to childhood corporal punishment and maltreatment experiences. In the process, we hope that it will dissolve some of the long-standing conceptual and communications impasses among the various affected disciplines. The requirement that practitioners, lawyers, and courts use valid scientific evidence to decide whether cases involve reasonable corporal punishment or abuse necessarily implicates the need for experts to be part of the process. It is thus essential that valid expertise be brought to bear on both the actual and probabilistic effects of parental behavior in infants and toddlers. Physical Abuse and Editorial Corporal Punishment - Wiley Physical Punishment of Children: Sweden and In other words, the law would create the fiction that the parents conduct was nonnormative when, for that child, it would be precisely the contrary. Childrens Bureau, U.S. Dept Health & Human Serv. Given these considerations and our objectivesto ameliorate systemic inconsistencies, signaling problems, and false-positive and false-negative errorsour principal suggestion is for policymakers to codify functional impairment as the harm the state intends to prohibit. Assistant District Attorney General, Davidson County, Tennessee, Irresponsible Expert Testimony. Thus, for example, judges in jurisdictions where the governing statute requires a finding of serious abuse before punishment is unlawful may read serious most seriously, to require that CPS show that the injury was life-threatening or at least permanently disfiguring. Corporal punishment itself is more common in the South than the North, among African American families than European American families, and among lower socioeconomic-status families than middle- and higher-status families.220 Also, religious cultural groups may encourage or discourage specific practices, creating the possibility that a parent will find the use of a corporal-punishment practice to be normative within a narrow religious culture even though it is unusual in the broader society. Professionals who daily must deal with child physical abuse uniformly speak of the fact that most physical abuse results from attempts to punish or control the child, which attempt has escalated to produce physical harm. What Is the Link Between Corporal Punishment and Child Physical Abuse? Again, functional impairment refers to short-term, long-term, or permanent impairment of emotional or physical functioning.212 Scientific evidence about which parenting behaviors lead to functional impairment supports the formal incorporation of several factors into this aspect of the reasonableness inquiry: the severity of the physical injury that results from parental conduct; whether the parents conduct is normative; the proportionality of the conduct in relation to the childs transgression; the manner in which the punishment is administered, which includes consideration of the location of the childs injuries and whether any objects were used; chronicity, meaning the frequency of the corporal punishment; and transparency and consistency, or whether the child knows the rules that will result in punishment and whether the parent administers those rules non-arbitrarily.213 Aside from the severity criterion, all of the factors force examination of the context in which the corporal punishment occurs and of the childs reaction to that context.214 Depending upon the circumstances, any one of these factors alone or two or more factors in combination might suffice to characterize parental conduct as unreasonable. CPS ought to be required to use only that evidence from laypersons and experts that meets rigorous validity standards. WebChild Abuse: An Overview. Dodge Kenneth, Coie John D, Lynam Donald. Courts act as a check on CPS decisions to intervene in the family. In this society and according to the law, the decision about the acceptability of this parental behavior rests with the parent under the principle of parental autonomy to the extent that the consequences, on average, do not exceed the threshold that would lead to functional impairment. Like the long-term follow-ups of children found by CPS to have been maltreated, these studies also reveal that physically maltreated children are likely to suffer numerous adverse outcomes, including being arrested for violent as well as nonviolent offenses, dropping out of school, becoming a teenage parent, and being fired from employment.188 These outcomes hold across cultural groups and family contexts, suggesting a fairly universal adverse impact of the experience of physical abuse.189. 206. Deater-Deckard Kirby, Dodge Kenneth, Sorbring Emma. This is true whether the question is presented as a federal constitutional claim150 or as a state-law claim that itself reflects this constitutional norm.151 Finally, because federal constitutional law formally preempts all other lawsincluding government-issued regulations, policies, or protocolsinconsistent perspectives on the factors that should influence where and how the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse is drawn are largely irrelevant to the legal process.152, For present purposes, this means that lawyers and the judiciary will always be inclined to test CPS interventions designed to protect the welfare of the child against the right of family privacy or parental autonomy, and they will generally read child-abuse definitions and corporal-punishment exceptions through this lens.
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