Shaken Baby Syndrome: Rotational Cranial Injuries Technical Report. Specifically, it is consistent with long-standing parental autonomy and corporal-punishment law, which draw the line of impermissibility at assaults that are either not in the childs best interests or that will accomplish the opposite of the goal of the corporal-punishment exceptionsecuring the childs future as a law-abiding and otherwise successful child and citizen.194 Notably, the rationales underlying the traditional corporal-punishment exception focus on the childs intellectual and emotional development, not on the childs physical well-being. Thus, current law fails to give useful guidance to its intended audience, and it provides for inconsistent case outcomes and an unacceptable risk of both false-positive and false-negative errors. Because it substantially mirrors the common-law tort standard and is otherwise consistent with standard evidence law, it also can be applied in that setting. For mild and normative levels of corporal punishment, these consequences may include, on the positive end, immediate compliance with parental commands and, on the negative end, increased anxiety, aggressive behavior, decreased academic success, and lower self-esteem.190 The costbenefit ratio of these consequences seems adverse to some observers but acceptable to others. Corporal punishment is the intentional use of physical force to cause bodily pain or discomfort as a penalty for unacceptable behaviour. The former provide guidance to mandated reporters and the latter establish the basis for the state to exercise jurisdiction over the child and family.18, In general, states define physical abuse of a child to include harm or threatened harm to a childs health or welfare, nonaccidental physical injury, or serious physical injury inflicted by an act or omission of a parent or another adult responsible for the childs care. The paper emphasizes the need for child protection professionals to understand parents' perspectives and acknowledge the importance of parents' religious beliefs. Coleman Doriane Lambelet. Interviews by Kenneth A. Law Contemp Probl. Corporal Punishment WebThe most commonly forms of physical punishment against a child includes spanking, smacking, and slapping, but also includes the use of an object. First, we do not want to be left with definitions so fine that they disallow necessary protective interventions based in different (nonnormative) or unprecedented and harmful parenting practices. Correspondingly, it acknowledges both that the state cannot replace parents as the childrens first[,] best caretakers, and that the state has a proper role to play when parents make too much of their rights and too little of their responsibilities, causing a net loss to their children in the process. the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health. Edwards Leonard P. Corporal Punishment and the Legal System. Partial support was found for the second and third hypotheses. Except in obvious and very extreme cases, developmental science cannot guide the identification of specific parental behaviors that will lead inevitably to the childs functional impairment. Of course, regardless of the normativeness of the practice, abuse would be found on evidence of functional impairment. Restatement (Second) of Torts 147 (1965); Fourteen states and the District of Columbia provide that reasonable physical discipline is not abuse. The Legal Aspects of Corporal Punishment in the Home: When Does Physical Discipline Cross the Line to Become Child Abuse? Although being fearful of corporal punishment itself is not sufficient to constitute a functional impairment, a resulting disruption of the childs secure attachment to a parent is. 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. A limit on this conclusion is that, beyond a certain level of severity of corporal punishment, harmful outcomes are likely to accrue to the child no matter what context surrounds the act or how it is interpreted by the child.179 This level is not always clear but may be a defining characteristic of physical abuse. Specifically, it proposes the adoption of a standard for reasonable corporal punishment that requires both a reasonable disciplinary motive and reasonable force, and it defines reasonableness according to both normative understandings and scientific evidence of capacity and functional impairment. Corporal Punishment Finally, although lists of illustrative violations in statutory definitions and CPS protocols may help to reduce parents and reporters concerns about the breadth and vagueness of typical child-abuse definitions, the listed behaviors do not necessarily correspond with harm or functional impairment. Among these acts are burning, biting, or cutting a child and nonaccidental injury to a child under the age of 18 months.41 Similarly, in Florida, physical discipline can be considered excessive when it results in significant bruises or welts, among other enumerated injuries.42, Finally, in addition to requiring that discipline be reasonable in nature and degree, several states statutes formally require decisionmakers to evaluate as a threshold matter whether the injury or incident was disciplinary in nature; the consequences flowing from that evaluation differ, depending on the jurisdiction.43 The most common of these provisions expressly codifies the two-pronged, common-law standard requiring parents seeking refuge under the privilege or exception to prove, first, that discipline was reasonably necessary or appropriate under the circumstances and, second, that the nature and degree of force used itself was reasonable.
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