Change in Caregivers’ Attitudes and Use of Corporal Punishment Following a Legal Ban in Kenya

• In Event: 3-026 - Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parenting and Children’s Socioemotional Functioning and Academic Achievement

Integrative Statement

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child had established the right of children to protection from all forms of violence, including corporal punishment. The realization of this right in societies worldwide hinges on laws that penalize violence against children and support attitudes and behaviors that promote their positive development. As of 2018, 53 countries have enacted laws banning corporal punishment, including those meted out by caregivers in home settings. Previous studies have reported concomitant decreases in use and endorsement of corporal punishment after the imposition of the legal bans, using non-panel historical data and/or comparisons of countries with and without legal bans (e.g. Lansford et al., 2017; Osterman et al., 2014; Zolotor & Puzia, 2010).
In 2010, Kenya instituted such a policy rendering corporal punishment in the home unlawful. It is the aim of this study to determine whether this 2010 policy is associated with changes in Kenyan caregivers’ use of corporal punishment and their beliefs about the effectiveness and normativeness of corporal punishment, across 7 waves of panel data collected from 2008 to 2015. Changes in these variables in the Kenyan sample are compared to changes in caregivers’ attitudes and behaviors in 8 other countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, USA) where such policy changes did not take place in that period. We expect that positive attitudes and use of corporal punishment will normatively decline across all sites, as the focal children of the caregivers in the sample age from 8 to 15 years, but that the decline is significantly steeper in Kenya from pre-2010 (waves 1-2) to post-2010 (waves 3-7).
Interviews were conducted annually with mothers and fathers in the nine countries; approximately 120 families were sampled from each site. The Child Discipline module of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey was used to measure the use of six forms of corporal punishment (e.g., hit or slapped him/her on the face) by any adult in the household in the previous month. Beliefs about the effectiveness of corporal punishment were assessed via respondents’ agreement with the statement, “Doing this would get the child to do what he/she is supposed to do right now,” for three corporal punishment items (e.g., spank, slap, or hit your child). Beliefs about the normativeness of corporal punishment were assessed via respondents’ perceptions of “how often other parents in your community” do each of the three corporal punishment behaviors.
Preliminary analyses on mothers’ and fathers’ use of corporal punishment for waves 1-5 involved estimating quadratic models with random person intercepts and linear slopes; the models where paths were free to vary for all the sites were well-fitting. Fixing linear and quadratic slopes across all sites except Kenya did not significantly worsen model fit; the linear and quadratic slopes in Kenya were significantly different from all other sites. These findings support the hypothesis that use of corporal punishment would decline more precipitously over time in Kenya than in the other countries, consistent with the timing of the legal ban in Kenya.

Authors

• Liane P. Alampay, Ateneo de Manila University
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Godwin, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Lansford, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Oburu, Maseno University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Concetta Pastorelli, Sapienza University of Rome
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ann T. Skinner, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emma Sorbring, University West
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laurence D. Steinberg, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sombat Tapanya, Chiang Mai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado, Universidad San Buenaventura
  Non-Presenting Author

• Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong, Chiang Mai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Suha M. Al-Hassan, Emirates College for Advanced Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dario Bacchini, University of Naples Federico II
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc H. Bornstein, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development & Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, UK
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lei Chang, University of Macau
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kirby Deater-Deckard, University Massachusetts
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura Di Giunta, Sapienza University of Rome
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kenneth A. Dodge, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patrick S. Malone, Malone Quantitative
  Non-Presenting Author