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| Most of us who recognize the harm in school “paddling” would say that the greatest dangers are psychological—often very comparable to rape victims. Mental and sexual trauma, like back injuries, are difficult to see and diagnose. We’ll ignore that most widespread “ordinary damage” for other chapters and concentrate here only on the “normal” expected physical harm that “routine paddling” causes. In other words we will ignore sexual and psychological injuries. We’ll also ignore the types of physical damage that is normally not “expected” such as cuts, head concussions, whiplash, spinal injuries, vaginal bleeding, ruptured scrotums, kidney damage, dried internal blood clots that don’t go away and require surgery to remove, paddle induced abortions, etc. Do “ordinary paddlings” carry medical risks physically? In other words is paddling a medically sound practice “when it is done right?” We might also ask, “can paddling ever be ‘done right?’” | | We have noted that paddling is unscientific and unmeasurable in many ways that make it impossible to predict or prevent serious injuries. That is why you can’t tell if a paddling was “excessive” until after the fact, and is why the heaviest hitting paddlings states have recently passed “Teacher Protection Acts” to prevent injured students or their parents from suing when children are injured. Our legislators, and the pro-hitting special interest groups that support them, know that there will be many injuries due to paddling—enough to make it worthwhile to draft these laws. There is no legal or civil reason for most paddling schools to fear recklessly or negligently injuring students with paddle beatings. They no longer even have to worry about the difficult and meager “after the fact” threat of civil redress that the Supreme Court relied on in Ingraham v Wright as a “safety” and the reason they allowed school paddling to continue. Harm to victims is no longer a concern to school boards in many paddling states, whether they have overt “Teacher Protection Acts,” or similar laws buried in various laws and codes, when they draft their paddle policies. They have been legally and civilly removed from responsibility for their own violent, and often sexually charged, harmful actions. | | Even if they or their staff secretly videotape school paddlings with hidden spy cams and sell them as S/M child pornography they are completely immune from lawsuits and are breaking no laws in many paddling states. We can note, in this regard, that there is a huge commercial market for spanking fetish and school paddling. Scenes of “real” school paddlings—particularly featuring "real victim" teen girls, would be very sought after pornography. It would fetch a high price on a private coded Internet server where customers could download MPEG or other photographic images. We might also note that Alabama, and possibly some other "teacher protection act" states whose laws I have yet to examine, specifically allows paddling teachers to produce child pornography. Of course you could outwardly say the site was a “study of CP” or some other cover. People would gladly pay large sums of money to “study it” with you. Suffice it to say that sensible child protection laws regarding pornography, photography, injurious actions, bruising, sexual fondling and molestation, sexual harassment, and child abuse that exist in nearly every other context are completely missing, and even “doublethought away,” when it comes to “the holy paddle” in school. | | Nonetheless students who are obviously injured can result in some bad press, and irate parents are not something most administrators want to face if they can avoid it. Although their policies and attitudes often say otherwise there may at least be some lip service among some paddling educators that they don’t want to physically harm children, even as they completely ignore blatant psychological and sexual damage. Such a confused district that wanted to “keep the paddle swinging” but “not physically injure” in too obvious a way could try a host of “half-steps” to make paddling seem semi-scientific, and thus, more palatable. | | They might mandate a “standard size” paddle. A few might even realize that the density matters too and mandate a “standard material” as well. Of course how hard the paddle is swung is subjective and unmeasurable, but this does provide an illusion that paddling is a measurable and “controlled process.” They might also mandate a “maximum” number of swats, knowing that even these “maximums” are routinely violated and “double paddlings” are often given “for two offenses”—skipping and lying, for example, or having two dress code violations at once, etc. Even if the board’s written policy says “5 swats maximum,” and it seems specifically designed for that to be the maximum number of swats per day, every school board I have heard of always backs up any principle who doubles that amount or more. Some school boards might, which I have never heard of yet by the way, even go so far as to mandate a “standard position” for the victim to assume. They might conceivably mandate “standard clothing” (or the lack thereof) for the victims. I have heard of some particularly perverted “panty paddlings” and such in some private schools as “standard paddle garments,” but I’m quite sure “student protection” or fairness has no part in the motive. Indeed the student stripping offers less protection and the sexual exploitation becomes extreme. Sexual abuse, and possible pornography production, are instead the only possible motivations that make sense for any kind of “strip down” spanking or paddling policies, since it is quite easy to induce pain and severe bruises, even through heavy clothing. | | In any case none of these “half measures” achieve “uniform” hitting results as they claim. A large number of uncontrollable and unmeasurable factors always remain. The school will never be able to mandate the victim’s body mass, muscular configuration, placement and size of the genitals, whether the victim’s buttocks tend to spread or stay together, or whether a teen female might be pregnant. They will never know, from student to student, from hitter to hitter, and even from swing to swing with the same student and hitter, how hard the paddle will be swung. They will have no idea, nor do they care, whether the victim is a "bleeder" who might develop extensive bruises that can calcify or cause lifelong damage or, on the other hand, has high cholesterol and thick blood and is in danger of blood clots. | | Girls are systematically worse off in nearly every possible way in paddling. They generally have smaller body mass than boys. Girls have a vaginal cavity that can sustain injuries and bleed by some unknown mechanism. Unlike boys teen girls may be pregnant. Not only might the "girl" be punished with a beating, but also her unborn (and perhaps unknown) fetus may be harmed or miscarried as a result of paddling. Further there is the obvious greater female danger of the typically male paddler being sexually aroused and the girl sexually exploited. Even if genders are matched there is a greater violation with female victims because women's buttocks is regarded as much more of a sexual area than a man's. Further women wear clothing that is typically only a fraction of the thickness of boy’s clothes. Almost every physical, psychological, and sexual variable is heavily stacked against females in school paddling. It is never a “standard” experience for males and females and cannot be made to be. For similar reasons paddling is never a “standard” procedure for any two students to nearly the extent that a short detention or some similar non-violent punishment would be. |
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