History of Corporal Punishment
| Corporal punishment has been around since ancient civilizations, and both adults and children have been subjected to this form of punishment. During the Middle Age, corporal punishment was in force against petty crimes and minor illegal acts. |
It was quite a widespread in the British army and navy to ‘flog’ or whip a person. It was corporal punishment that was meted out to the person who had something wrong or illegal. However, in 1874 this was no longer practiced in the navy or the army. And, the last act of flogging in prison in the UK was officially in 1962.
In the US, teachers and authorities at school had the right to spank or whip a student. This was viewed as an action necessary to discipline a student. The first time people spoke up against corporal punishment in American schools was in the year 1866, when the parents of a child who had been whipped by a teacher 15 to 20 times, had sought legal assistance. In the year 1868, a number of parents in Beverly, Massachusetts, wanted schools to stop corporal punishment, but school committees did not change their rules. The Cambridge school board discovered in 1880 that out of 12,973 boy students, there were 10,973 recorded incidents of corporal punishment.
The first European nation that officially put an end to corporal punishment was Sweden, while most of Europe followed suit by the end of the 1800s. Corporal punishment was abolished permanently from New York schools by 1877, but it remained in the state of Massachusetts for another 70 years. It was only during the late 1970s when Massachusetts finally made corporal punishment illegal.
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