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WASHINGTON, DC
According to this year’s student handbook, wearing “sagging pants” or being too touchy with a crush in the hallway is enough to get a teenager paddled by the school principal in Union County, Mississippi. A first-time dress code infraction, public display of affection, repeated tardiness or failure to hand in homework three times in nine weeks makes children eligible for corporal punishment. Beatings in the state’s schools are not uncommon. In 2018, the year for which the latest numbers are available, 69,000 American children were hit by public-school staff—30% of them in Mississippi. Though intentionally wounding a pet cat is punishable by six months in prison, teachers in Mississippi can legally strike kindergarteners with wooden paddles for speaking out of turn.
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Corporal punishment in public schools is legal in 19 American states; in private school it is permitted in all but two. For a wealthy country that is unusual. In Britain the practice was banned in 1986. Canada did away with it in 2004. In all of Europe and most of South America and East Asia it is outlawed. But since there is no federal prohibition on the books, American students, mostly in the South, can still be hit. Though others disregard it, America is the only country not to have ratified the United Nations’ treaty to protect the rights of children, which prohibits the practice.
The legal parameters for corporal punishment in Mississippi are vague. School boards and superintendents tend to set the guidelines. But according to Mississippi state law, as long as the act is not deemed “malicious”, teachers and administrators cannot be held liable for harm done to children. There are no statutes to specify which instruments can be used, how many times a day a child can be paddled or how old they must be.
In Mississippi black children bear the brunt of the beatings. Though just under half of the state’s students are black, in 2018 nearly two-thirds of those hit in school were. The majority were boys and one in six were disabled. Parents can put their children on the “no paddle list”—a practice encouraged by a school in Kentucky if the child “bruises easy”, suffers from severe depression or has been physically abused—but amid the back-to-school chaos many forget
