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| Here is a case from a US Senate hearing that we’ll read more fully in a few chapters. I consider it “the best documented case” because we have the very rare combination of an interview with the victim, sworn testimony from the paddler, as well as evidence of lifetime harm the victim continued to suffer several years later from the “quick and easy” paddle option. Suffice it to say you sometimes collect one or two of these elements from the same paddling incident, but rarely all together in one case study. | | The mother, once again, somewhat supported school paddling, or at least was not too alarmed by it, until she saw what it did to her daughter. She did not, however, give permission for this paddling or any paddling ever. Nevertheless she blindly trusted that paddling would not be abusive, and she blindly trusted the “parental permission” that was “needed” to allow her to protect her teen daughter from abuse. She didn’t know the school was legally free to ignore the lack of permission, to violate every one of their own guidelines, to recklessly inflict serious injuries to her child, and to do so in an extremely perverse way. She allowed her daughter to be enrolled in a paddling school. She didn’t fully realize the danger in time—and once she did, it was too late. | | The outraged mom and her daughter, injured severely on many levels, got no relief in North Carolina’s “kangaroo courts,” at least where paddling was concerned. Even if they had won some “legal victory,” however, or had been financially compensated somehow for this girl’s lifetime harm, it would not, of course, have given this girl her childhood back. It would not have cured the problems, beyond the vaginal bleeding, that “Sharon” experienced—which were very consistent with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and possible chiropractic damage. | | This parent fully saw the danger after the fact—but she also sensed it at the time in her daughter’s particular case. She never did give her consent for her daughter to be paddled on that occasion. The zealous paddling male assistant principal, who conveniently and mysteriously took over the three teen girl’s “paddle option” case from a female AP who started it, never did contact Sharon’s mother as the school rules “required.” When her daughter asked what her mom thought about it, she told her 17-year-old honor student daughter not to take the paddling under any circumstance. Still mom generally thought the school had a “right to paddle” within their guidelines. After seeing the severe abuse of her daughter, however, she no longer believed that anyone should ever have “that right.” | | (The names of the victim and her mother have been altered throughout this book but are a matter of US Senate public record. We’ll see a fuller account later.) | | Senator SPECTER: Mrs. Anderson, do you think there is any circumstance under which school officials would be justified in inflicting corporal punishment on students for any kind of student misbehavior? | | Mrs. ANDERSON: I used to think that they had that right, but after experiencing the trauma that it can create, I have changed my mind completely about it…. I felt responsible, myself, for putting her into a situation where she could not be protected from being beaten up. When children are in school, you expect that there is a possibility that they can be beaten up by another child. But to have that same thing happen, in the name of education, by a grown man, who looks like a weight-lifter, who has a very overdeveloped upper body, and see her under the stress and tension--and what she has not told you is that right after this happened, she had a complete personality change. She did not want to go to school. She did not want to go to church. (Pause.) I am sorry. | |
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