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| Winter in Michigan. What does it have to do with school paddling? A TV news show ran an article warning Michigan drivers that driving cars over the potholes that can form in our winters can lead to spinal compression injuries and back problems. This is from relatively slight bumps sitting on a padded cushion on a car with springs and shock absorbers—absolutely nothing in comparison to the potential back injuries from being beaten with a board. Chiropractors have long opposed school paddling for just this reason. Many have stated that the pressure needed to manipulate the spine is much less than that imposed by a swinging paddle, let alone the compression and whiplash effects that are very common. Psychologists and medical doctors also generally see medical and psychological dangers. Although you may be able to find a stray doctor or psychiatrist, and perhaps even a chiropractor, who support school paddling they would be in a distinct minority. It speaks volumes on the medical effects of paddling, for those who don’t want to deeply consider the issues, that medical, psychological, and chiropractic associations all oppose school paddling on various medical grounds. I have a sense that chiropractors oppose paddling more than any other medical people do. They know how little spinal pressure it takes to manipulate the spine and set the stage for life-long debilitating degeneration of the spine and all bodily organs (whose nerves pass through the spine). | | There are at least three possible spine-related injuries that can occur with paddling. The first type of spine injury that paddling can create is subtle but long-term damage from the spinal compression itself when the student is struck. The second form of back injuries occur from whiplash when the student “jumps up,” as the kids call it, from the pain, for which they are often sadistically and perversely given “extra swats” for. If you see a paddling on film—which is the only way most of us will see a paddling since we are not generally witnessing these events--you will often observe a “whiplash effect” where the victim’s neck violently snaps back in reaction to each hit. Nearly all of the women we interviewed have reported “jumping up” or their head whiplashing back. The third type is direct damage when the paddle directly strikes the spine. This what happened to my friend from work, “Joe.” | | I have another friend “Andy” who had a construction accident that made me appreciate how little things can add up in this regard. A man dropped a steel plum-bob from a height that glanced across my friend’s back. It hurt but he shrugged it off and went through the rest of his shift. The next day he could not move or get out of bed. The plum-bob had glanced his spine and had sent a tiny sliver of bone into his spinal cord. The fluid is slowly draining out, and he now gets through each day with morphine while his back deteriorates without remedy. | | In my other friend Joe’s case, his back injury was paddled induced. The “teacher” wielding the paddle probably did not intend to injure the spine, but he had an obscenely huge paddle that he couldn’t control (as if this type of violent child abuse could ever be truly “in control”). This “maniac” teacher definitely had an attitude of negligent disregard for whatever injuries he was inflicting. He was either too ignorant or too sadistic to care if his swings did get out of control. When I asked how large the paddle was my co-worker pulled out a measuring tape. He remembers it as being about 28” long by 10” wide by ¾” thick. The paddle also had holes drilled in it which can increase blistering. That is larger than most paddles for sure—but then again there is not now, nor has there ever been, a “standard paddle” either of dimension or material. Every principal and every school is free to “do whatever they want to.” | | I heard a male paddling Christian school teacher laugh once about a teacher he had when he was a high school student who had a paddle with hinges and a second board, so the student got “two swats” with every hit. There would be a "bang bang" with every swing—the first direct hit and the second when the “claptrap” board followed. This “Christian school teacher” also laughed a lot about swats he dished out and how scared the kids looked. He and he was constantly being reprimanded for being too “huggy” with high school girls, and for allowing his hands to wander too much. | | Another woman described how a man would paddle the girls in gym class and “send them into the air—literally.” She didn’t say the size of the paddle he used but that was his big thrill—to see if he could actually launch the girls off their feet. The woman was middle aged and tears welled up in her eyes as she told me about this guy she had in the 6th grade. I don’t believe she was even paddled by him. Here was a schoolteacher herself, and a member of a Christian school board at that, crying 35 years later about what she witnessed happening to her friends decades before when she was in the sixth grade. | | “Quick and easy paddling?” Not for the victims many times, and often not for witnesses either. We could probably write a book about the paddling excesses and unusual “funny stories” as some see them, but that would be another book. No matter how many cases you see most folks, like the Supreme Court in 1977, assume they all must be “aberrations.” If we heard 10, or 100, or 1000, or 100,000, I think that attitude and doublethink would be the same. We don’t really want to see what is going on. |
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