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| The mother evidently was eligible to sign a form forbidding corporal punishment, and either didn’t know or didn’t take the time to do it, or maybe thought paddling would be ok, or perhaps believed it wasn’t an issue with her honor student and homecoming queen daughter. | | This case took place in Ohio—so it isn’t all in the South. In fact beating children in school isn’t even a “Southern thing.” Not so long ago paddling was performed in 49 states—although often not as perversely as is done today in the remaining paddling states. For various reasons that we’ll examine later it is harder to alter the “hitting momentum” in the South. Beating children in school is, however, not unique to the South and did not originate there. In this Ohio case a 17-year-old girl was paddled so hard, with “just one swat” by the 250-pound male assistant principal for “a schoolyard tiff that ended in a shove,” that she bled vaginally for 23 days afterwards. | | The doctor’s first theory was that her uterus had been knocked out of place. A later theory was that maybe the extreme impact of the board that knocked her across the desk might have set up a shock reaction where her body didn’t know how to process such a hit. Maybe she “just started bleeding” for weeks. I don’t know if they ever figured it out, but either way it doesn’t sound good to me. | | The mother and daughter sued and the case dragged on for years. Finally some court ruled that it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction somehow. The daughter urged her mom to drop the case at that time and everything ended there. It must have been very draining for her at just the time of life when she was trying to go to college, date boys, perhaps get an internship or a job, and try to get a start on life. It must have also been very humiliating for her with the publicity, with everyone speculating on how this beautiful young prom queen bent over a desk for a paddling from the large man and had her “ass spanked so hard” that her uterus got knocked loose, or whatever happened. | | This is a case where the Ohio legislature took the football down to the one-yard line and almost made a goal of enlightenment, but instead tossed it to the child abusers, who then took it all the way back to the 50. They passed a law prohibiting school paddling statewide, but then inserted “weasel loopholes” for schools to reinstate paddling “if they wanted to.” A handful of the most backward and abusive schools promptly did so--and this young woman paid the price, along with hundreds of other children that we don’t hear about every year. | | After seeing her fruitless legal ordeal other teens, who suffer as much as she did, are silent today. They watched her very strong case create a “black hole” of time and money drain as well as extreme humiliation for the victim, who was not kept anonymous over this brutal sexual assault the way a "normal” sex assault victim would be, just to see it ultimately evaporate. These cases nearly always get tossed or dropped for various reasons. The law is extremely hostile to paddle-injured children in every paddling state. Whether through overt hostile laws that protect abusers or through continuous legal “mistakes” that effectively nullify cases regardless of merit the utter futility of taking any school paddling case to court, no matter how abusive, is well known by every victim of this sort of abuse across the country. No matter how good our courts are in other settings they are completely worthless in protecting children from abusive school beatings at every level—local, state, Federal, and “Supreme.” They are no more socially enlightened on this issue today than courts at every level were in the Antebellum South on the issue of slavery. They might as well not even exist other than to codify and give legal imprimatur to physical and sexual child abuse whenever a new approval is needed. | | “But Jeff…” some may argue. You are using “loaded language” in calling the paddling Ohio schools “backward.” Why not just state your case and leave the “name calling” out of it? The fact is that any school that is battering children with boards is “backward” and is doing tremendous lifetime damage to many of the children, even if they got the highest ratings and test scores academically. Any child would be far better served to attend a mediocre graded school without paddling than the highest rated school that does paddle. The grades and career choices are easier to overcome by study and tutoring or attending community college than the lifetime of trauma and induced mental and sexual disorders that paddling creates in many victims. That is the sense I use the word even without considering academics. |
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