School-Based Corporal Punishment: A Form of State Violence

• In Event: Children at the Fault Lines: Rights, Protection, and State Violence

Abstract

Each year, thousands of students in the United States are physically punished in schools, often for minor infractions. Positioned as a consequence or tool of school discipline alongside detention, suspension, or expulsion, this framing understates the reality that corporal punishment is a form of state violence against children. Drawing on over a year of fieldwork at a predominantly Black public middle school in Louisiana, I argue that corporal punishment is a distinct and particularly harmful form of state violence in U.S. schools, one that has does little to correct or guide students and instead punishes and humiliates them while reinforcing adult power. I find that corporal punishment is often carried out as what I term a ‘ritual of humiliation,’ wherein students are subject to both embodied and verbal forms of domination by adults. I describe how school-based corporal punishment is a component of what I term the institution-family punishment nexus, wherein state institutions and families interact in service of controlling and punishing children, and show that this often results in ‘double jeopardy’ for children - physical punishment for an offense both at school and at home. I show how children view and resist this form of state violence, including differentiating between state- and family- administered physical punishment, while also illustrating the social, emotional, and physical consequences to students. I conclude by discussing how this form of state violence – one that students who attend rural schools, schools in the South, and schools with higher proportions of Black students are disproportionately subjected to – should be understood as a driver of racialized and place-related educational inequality, while also further socializing children to accept adult and state violence and control.

Author

• Meaghan Mingo, University of Notre Dame