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| There are many ways that “corporal punishment” can permanently injure or kill children. Sometimes the harm is immediate and obvious. More often paddle damage is subtle and long term and may take years to fully show up. The result is the same. This is true of psychological trauma, whiplash and spinal injuries, blood vessel damage, scarring, and not the least the passage of incurable bloodborne diseases. It is not likely that a school that truly seldom uses the paddle—perhaps only once or twice per year—on students who are fully and thickly clothed, who are paddled singly and not in group paddling, would pass any diseases with corporal punishment. The odds go up tremendously, however, when you have schools and institutions that beat children often, with several victims in one day, or beating sessions with multiple victims at once. The risk is increased further with greater skin/blood/paddle contact possibilities when students are scantily clad, say in thin shorts, cheerleader shorts, or panties. The odds become highest when the beatings are both severe and applied to victim's bare skin, as is commonly done in many Southern and rural US “Christian” schools and youth ranches. There are many incurable diseases that can easily pass with the tiniest microscopic mixing of blood. Blood can be mixed in mass beating sessions with multiple victims. It can also be mixed, and diseases passed, with individual sessions separated by time but using the same unsterile beating implement. | | Sub Saharan Africa is a part of the world where AIDS and HIV, as well as other diseases, are epidemic. Many children carry these viruses. It is a land filled with poverty and ignorance. As we’ve seen in the US these are primary indicators for a high rate of corporal punishment as well. It is entirely possible that 10%, or some other high figure, of group child beatings in this part of the world result in the transmission of AIDS. | | On May 14, 2001, the African Eye News Service released a story from South Africa where 150 pupils marched to the new legislator complex in Mpumalanga to protest the use of sjamboks for corporal punishment in their private school. They showed shocked legislators raw wounds, welts, and bruises on their backs, buttocks, and legs. The government was surprised at the damage and also impressed with the student’s method of resolving the issue. They praised them for coming on their own time rather than boycotting the abusive school and they promised to investigate. Whether the government followed up in a meaningful way or not I don’t know but the land is very impoverished and the difficulties in effecting any social changes are doubtless great. | | A Sjambok is a heavy “cane” style beating instrument that the Apartheid police once used to beat people with—something in between a police club in the US and a thin cane –but many other implements, including paddles and belts, are also capable of causing cuts and welts. Blood that makes it to the skin surface and onto the beating implement is capable of passing bloodborne pathogens. It is also possible that the “red dots” from ruptured capillaries that are fairly common among paddle victims could release microscopic amounts of blood. Beating the bare, or very thinly clothed, skin with any kind of implement is not a sterile process. It may result in blood contamination. Some beating styles and implements are much more likely to produce blood transmission, but as we’ll see in this chapter none are immune. | | Often these African children received mass corporal punishment sessions, or there was only a brief time between beatings of various pupils. One student described a typical incident where he was charged, along with a group of boys, with drinking alcohol. There was no proof or due process but they were all “hauled into a room and given 30 lashes each.” He cried. Beyond the pain and unknown to him, however, he may have contracted HIV and effectively a death sentence from the teacher or one of the boys beaten before him, or perhaps from one of the boys beaten the day before even, who had AIDS. If he contracted AIDS in this fashion and he is then beaten prior to another pupil then his beating will likely continue to pass AIDS on to other students as well. The disease will take years to show up. During the years when the disease is contracted but not apparent the victims will leave school. Years will pass where they will be likely to have sexual experiences of some sort. When the school-beating induced AIDS is finally apparent the victim's consensual sexual activity over the intervening years will get the blame. Since school beating as a possible cause of AIDS transmission is not even "on the radar," only "regular sex" will be considered as a cause, even if no other sexual partner had the disease previously, and even if the disease cannot be explained. No-one will consider the school or youth ranch mass beatings at fault even if for some reason a student had no sexual contact at all for the next decade. In an odd twist by US standards the school adult staff members at that school were also often beaten and humiliated—so at least there was some “democracy” in that. The director alone seemed to be immune. The teachers were subject to beatings too. This increases the prospect of the spread of AIDS from teachers to students through school beatings. | | In another recent opinion article from Africa a “Christian Minister” begs for the “right to cane” pupils. Included in the article is a photo of at least 10 children outside on their knees with their hands above their heads in a mass corporal punishment that the “good Reverend” feels is not strong enough and which would be better meted out by a caning (to their bare buttocks?) | | Once again the danger of mass caning being a death sentence to children, as well as a long string of future people they will contact in a continent ravaged with AIDS, seems to be completely unrecognized. This blindness is perhaps due to the extreme poverty and ignorance of the region, or perhaps it is simply because a CP-AIDS connection is something none of us here in the US think about either. We have yet to recognize the possibility of corporal punishment being a vehicle for bloodborne disease transmission. |
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