About five months ago, the first item on the evening television news had to do with the addition of recruits to the ranks of the police force. The minister in charge of security, Dr Horace Chang, also promised that there would be more recruits coming soon.

The minister has had some successes with a reduction in murder and rape, among other offences, in recent times. Over the years, however, this ministry has been considered a graveyard as the ministers are always blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Following this news item came a story confirming information I received earlier in the day. At a high school in St Elizabeth, a junior student accidentally stepped on the shoe of a senior student. Choosing the junior’s head as a target, the senior kicked and punched him into a state of unconsciousness.

Shocked students shook the junior, looking for signs of life before lifting him and journeying on foot into the town, looking for medical help. Shaking a person with head injuries and then moving him/her is strictly forbidden. But since there seemed to be no adults at that school, the students should be lauded for their efforts.

It was the third medical institution at which the boy was placed that he got the treatment he needed. Weeks later, he still had pain and swelling around his eyes, and we can only guess the extent of the long-term damage. Who will shoulder the costs?

Once, in my early years as a social worker, I received a call from a grandmother living in the Upper Elletson Road area. It seems her grandson — her daughter’s son — returned from school and complained that another boy had hit him. Livid, the mother left with him, ostensibly to find this boy. The grandmother was worried. It was two hours, she heard nothing from her daughter, and there was tension in the area.

It was near nightfall when she called back to say her daughter had returned and seemed to be in good spirits, but she still wanted me to talk to her about her anger problems.

The mother said she walked as far as Rockfort before finding the boy’s home. There, she stated the problem to the boy’s mother, who asked her how she felt the matter should be dealt with. She said she wanted her son to “thump him back”. The mother agreed. At that stage, her son surprised her by stating that he did not want to hit anybody. Embarrassed, she told him that if he did not hit the boy, she would beat him all the way back to Elletson Road. This is how she reported what happened next;

“Mi say, my son rail up and give the bwoy one thump inna di top part a him belly like mi did show him. Di bwoy scream out and ben up and drop…Mi don’t even look pan him or him mada, mi take my son and leave. So him learn nuh fi take no disrespect from no one.”

More recently I received a video that eventually went viral. It depicted a half-naked woman using a cutlass to deliver a brutal beating to her half-naked daughter. Before writing about it, I decided to ask some women in a similar socio-economic position how they felt about beating children. The consensus was that children should be beaten regularly to keep them in line. And the Government had no right to tell parents how to discipline their children. One woman asked me, “So if we don’t beat them, how we going to get them to behave?

Since the post-COVID period, there seems to be a significant increase in violent incidents in schools. I continue to receive two or three videos each week depicting students — mainly girls — throwing caution and their uniforms to the wind to swinging and kick at their opponents while others gather to register a punch or a stomp.

But last week one reached me that I found particularly revolting. In it a woman of quite ample proportions was standing on a child’s chest while using her weight to stomp the child on her neck and face. I learnt the following from my subsequent investigations:

1) If there was no intervention, she was prepared to continue until the child stopped moving.

2) She is the mother of the child.

3) She is a committed Christian.

4) She is one of her church’s ‘cornerstone’ members.

The habit of beating and battering to discipline remains among the last holdouts of old-fashioned childrearing in many countries, including Jamaica. A growing body of research has shown that spanking and other forms of physical discipline can pose serious risks to children, but many parents aren’t hearing the message. Many studies have shown that physical punishment — including spanking, hitting, and other means of causing pain — can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behaviour, physical injury, and mental health problems for children. Several mothers I have spoken to seem determined to ‘punish out’ the behaviours they do not want through beatings of increasing severity.

Corporal punishment also persists because it is a practice with strong ties to religion, particularly to Christianity. Religious leaders, like their 18th-century compatriots, make connections between firm discipline and a child’s spiritual well-being and encourage parents to use corporal punishment as an important part of their discipline repertoire.

Internationally, physical punishment is increasingly being viewed as a violation of children’s human rights. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive in 2006 calling physical punishment “legalised violence against children” that should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures”.

Around the world, 30 countries have banned physical punishment of children in all settings, including the home. In one meta-analysis of 27 studies, every single study found that the more parents used corporal punishment, the more aggressive their children were. Similarly, 12 of 13 studies found that the more frequently or severely corporal punishment was administered, the more strongly it was associated with antisocial behaviour.

There are a number of consequences of physical punishment:

1) Being beaten gives a child the idea that it is okay to hit smaller people if it is done for a reason. The parent is automatically giving him/her the licence to hit others.

2) Being beaten negatively affects the self-image of children and they are likely to develop the self-image of “losers” and end up with no self-respect for themselves.

3) Your child ends up being afraid of you and later gets detached from you.

4) It stays with children for a long time. A University of Missouri study found that the more children are spanked, the more defiant they become.

5)Beatings do not have any benefits in terms of development whatsoever.

6) Anger becomes a primary behaviour. Beating sows the seeds of anger, and the child is more likely to have emotional issues as he or she grows up.

7) Parents get out of control while beating. As the child repeats the behaviour, the beatings become more severe. This can cause serious problems.

8) Low self-esteem in children. Surveys show that children subjected to corporal punishment as they grew up were more likely to exhibit antisocial and even egocentric behaviour in their adulthood.

9) Obesity as a result of overeating and a sedentary lifestyle are some of the results of negative childhood experiences.

10) Beatings bring back bad memories. Many people recall traumatic childhood experiences more often than pleasant ones.

In this country every serious problem can be laid squarely at the feet of parental abuse or neglect. In some cases, the abuse preceded the birth of the child. Check – if you will – the many street dances taking place each week and the number of pregnant women with an alcoholic beverage in one hand and a smoking device in the other.

Credible research suggests that maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSP) is associated with externalising behaviour problems among offspring ranging from hyperactivity and aggression in early childhood to conduct disorder and delinquency during adolescence. Evidence also suggests that MSP is related to adult antisocial behaviour (ASB), such as criminal offending.

Parents must present a medical report for each child at the beginning of the school year. But many doctors do little more than sign a document. May I submit that if each child were to be thoroughly examined, many, many horror stories would be revealed. Parents would be hard-pressed to explain the cigarette burns and the variety of wounds of varying ages hidden by clothes.

In a 2003 article in Psychology magazine it was reported that criminal behaviour and violence may be the consequence of head injuries acquired during childhood. Among criminals, the difference between violent and non-violent inmates was a history of suffering head injuries in early life that were never treated. Blows to the head during development can predispose to violent criminal behaviour. May I suggest to our Department of Correctional Services that the treatment of cognitive, behavioural, and emotional consequences of brain injury could be a measure for crime prevention.

I am proposing that the physical punishment of children be made illegal in all settings, including the home. This is not going to be a popular decision. But if certain changes are to take place, parents will have to be closely monitored – policed, even.

Glenn Tucker is an educator and a sociologist. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or glenntucker2011@gmail.com.