Corporal punishment (CP) is defined as “an act carried out with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purposes of correction and control”.

Spanking and slapping are a “socially legitimate form of interpersonal violence” used to discipline children in the United States and many other countries. Spanking can, it seems, include the use of an object such as a stick, but is subjectively distinguished from a violent assault.

A US study by Straus and Paschall on the effects on cognitive ability of whacking kids came up with one really positive message:

In the younger children, the thing that made the biggest difference to IQ scores was whether or not mothers provided cognitive stimulation. This was more important than anything else, including corporal punishment.

The bad news was:

The figures revealed that 93 per cent of mothers had spanked 2- to 4-year-olds once or more per week, whereas only 58 per cent had turned to physical discipline with the older [age 5 to 9] kids. Nearly half of toddlers’ moms had spanked their children three or more times per week, Straus and Paschall found.

Four years later, younger children who had never felt their mother’s palm had gained an average of 5.5 IQ points compared with kids who had suffered corporal punishment, while older unspanked children had gained 2 IQ points, on average.

They say that if you smack and provide cognitive stimulation kids will be OK, well, almost, but not as OK as they would be if parents didn’t smack.

“93 per cent of mothers had spanked 2- to 4-year-olds once or more per week” is a helluva lot of spanking and I would have thought largely destructive of relationships where cognitive stimulation is the norm.

We have to ask ourselves what sort of behaviour regular spanking is modelling. Authoritarian bullying? Yet we are told:

“The practical side of this is that paediatricians and child psychologists need to start doing what none of them do now, and say, ‘Never spank under any circumstances,’” says Murray Straus, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who led the new study along with Mallie Paschall at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California. (Emphasis added)

Paediatricians are, I understand, excellent on physical development, but not expert on psycho-social development. But child psychologists?

This ScienceDaily report includes a graph showing the damage done.

I wonder what the situation is here in Australia. Bad and getting worse?

If we have an epidemic of corporal punishment in the early childhood years, or even an undesirable level of CP (one instance is too much), the question remains as to what to do about it. The critical phase for child development is, I understand, age 1-3 or the toddler stage. This is when doors are opened or closed, basic behaviour patterns established, even the foundations of personality and future mental health. Parenting is a complex business and learned rather than intuitive. So tragically we see adverse parenting practices emerging almost automatically in subsequent generations.

I thought there was some positive potential in the Government’s early childhood education plans of setting up one-stop community support child services centres. But I’ve heard nothing in recent times. Was this a casualty of the transfer of $2.5 billion from education to climate change initiatives, largely to be allocated towards clean coal? Surely not!

The State Government here offers a Management of Young Children Program (MYCP) which on one opinion I value is even better than Prof Matt Sanders’ world famous Triple P Positive Parenting Program. It involves observation of parents interacting with children and being offered alternative strategies in dealing with issues.

I’m sure other states have similar initiatives which could be supported, built upon and made more widely available. I’m sure that even for the bean counters the social capital and human productivity engendered would be worth every cent.

In fact the ScienceDaily story picks up a separate study by Straus which explores the relationships between level of economic development, national average IQ and prevalence of CP, purporting to show that:

a higher national level of economic development underlies both fewer parents using corporal punishment and a higher national IQ.

The article says that there is a worldwide trend away from corporal punishment and 24 countries made it illegal in 2009. Some countries have “made vigorous efforts to inform the public and assist parents in managing their children.” I’m a bit out of the loop on these matters and don’t know the legal situation in Australian states, but if there was a vigorous program to assist parents I’d surely know about it.

From Murray Straus’s website there are links to the Straus and Paschall paper and the separate international study. If you want to explore the topic in more detail, I’d recommend both, not without reservations.

Here’s the link to the published paper.

The Straus and Paschall paper drew the sample from women first interviewed in 1979 as part of a national longitudinal survey of youth. A strength is that quite a lot is known about the mothers, so the relationships between various factors could be explored. A weakness is that no information was gathered about the fathers. Data collection for this study began in 1986.

Longitudinal testing of cognitive ability was done but not with a standard IQ test. The second (T2) test, for example, was a Math and Reading Recognition test. I’d query whether it measured problem solving. I suspect it was narrower than an IQ test, which itself is a narrow concept of intelligence. (There was a brilliant post on this topic back in 2005.)

Similarly the notions of maternal “cognitive stimulation” and “emotional support” seem limited.

There was an astonishing amount of hitting going on. For the 2-4 year-old group, a third of mothers spanked four or more times a week, while 12.8% spanked seven or more times per week. The 6.6% who were not hit during the week preceding T1 and T2 may nevertheless have been hit at other times.

The Straus study showed that whereas 70% or so consistently over time favour CP in the US over 90% in fact do so. Compare this with Sweden where approval of CP was down to 11% in 1994.

The Straus paper has a lot of interesting information about other research, but as a piece of research as such it is basically RS. Two half-assed questions were added to an international dating violence study which sampled students at 68 universities in 32 countries. (What does being spanked or hit “a lot” mean?) The sample wasn’t large enough to use sophisticated statistical techniques and the question was overly subjective and reliant on memory. These weaknesses are admitted in the paper.

Still Straus may be onto something by suggesting the reduction of CP noted in many parts of the world as at least one explanation of the mysterious Flynn effect, the fact that measured average IQ increases over the generations just about everywhere, for no apparent reason. I suspect this is premature and needs teasing out by a far better designed experiment. But I like the absence of CP as an indicator of a civilised society.

Defence heads have ordered an investigation into claims departmental officials conducted covert inquiries into their minister Joel Fitzgibbon. The unnamed officials investigated the defence minister’s association with a Chinese-born Sydney businesswoman and whether it constituted a security risk. Defence force head Angus Houston and departmental secretary Nick Warner have ordered the inquiry, AAP has been told…

Former senior defence official Alan Behm said it was not standard procedure for a department to investigate its minister. Any such inquiry would have to be authorised through the prime minister’s office and be conducted through proper channels, he said. “Whenever you have a situation where a department appears to act unilaterally … investigating the affairs of its minister, then there is a total breakdown in trust.”

Whether we think it civilized behaviour or not, foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to gain access to stuff our government tries to keep secret; we return the favour. And it’s pretty standard operating procedure for intelligence agencies to attempt to gain information by using people with family ties to the country concerned. And, by definition, the Defence Minister is going to know all sorts of secret stuff other governments want to know. Given all of that, on the face of it it’s not unreasonable to look into whether a Defence Minister’s close friend is, wittingly or unwittingly, being used by a foreign government to obtain some of that information.

But – as well as the point that under the circumstances the PM’s office should surely have been informed, shouldn’t this have been a job primarily for ASIO and, perhaps, ASIS?

UPDATE: According to departmental secretary Nick Warner, neither he nor Angus Houston had any knowledge of the allegations. He has ordered an investigation into the alleged investigation. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Defence Department…

As the article reports, Animal Liberation were breaking the law to conduct “open rescues”:

Despite the doubts, Andrew remained active enough to be part of a midnight raid on a battery hen farm at Wallan in June. The raid, or “open rescue” as the animal activists call it, saved 14 hens from a cruel death in excrement pits – which have no food or water – beneath their cages.

Andrew played an important role. He dived into the excrement pit and saved several hens, including one given the name Martha, who weighed only 400 grams instead of a healthy 1.8 kilograms.

Yes, they were breaking and entering. But, if this was the worst that Animal Liberation was getting up to, at the very least this is a huge waste of police resources.

If activist groups show signs of planning serious crimes, that is of course an appropriate target for police investigation. Whichever government organization was responsible for getting an undercover officer in with Benbrika’s hotheads was clearly doing the right thing by doing so. But despite the claims by the Victoria Police that the bad old days are over, these examples smell a little like the police playing at being spies on largely harmless groups for no particularly good reason. And, to give Red Ted Baillieu credit, he’s actually demonstrated some small-l liberal credentials by at least asking what safeguards are in place to prevent inappropriate surveillance.

So, own up, LP readers. Which one of you is the undercover cop?