Spanking Can Be Sex Abuse

An April 6, 2018 news article in the Washington Post, “Evangelicals are planning a high-profile meeting with Trump,” contains this quote from Ed Stetzer, who serves as executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College:

“I really don’t want to explain again to my middle-school daughter what spanking and the president have to do with one another.”

Dr. Stetzer’s sentiment, which alludes to claims by adult film actress Stormy Daniels that Donald Trump once asked her to spank him during an extramarital affair, would no doubt resonate with parents across the political and religious spectrum. U.S. evangelicals, however, are especially likely to be made uneasy by this detail of the president’s alleged bedroom behavior.

This is due in part to their tendency to advocate the spanking of children — sometimes including teenagers.

Certain passages from the Book of Proverbs are often quoted to justify such punishment, as seen on a billboard in Oklahoma that journalism professor Stacey Patton photographed and critically posted on Facebook some years ago. It reads, in part: “Use the Rod on your children and save their life — PROVERBS 23:13–14.” An identical billboard can be seen along I-40 in eastern Arkansas. It bears mentioning that these Solomonic injunctions have lately been taught inside the White House, with a tie-in to immigration policy.

Billboard on Interstate 40 in Arkansas (photo credit: Blake Hutchinson)

Unlike the (consensual) intimate acts we’ve seen ascribed to other high-profile politicians, spanking has a unique duality and potential for ambiguity. This creates a serious hazard for (non-consenting) minors who are legally fair game for corporal punishment — not only at home, but also at school and other settings where adults may claim in loco parentis status. No small number of teachers, coaches, clerics, babysitters, moms’ boyfriends, etc. have, under the guise of “old school discipline,” spanked kids for their own gratification.

Sometimes the victim’s parents are naively on board with the spankings, perhaps citing or hoping for improvement in their child’s behavior. And if ulterior motives are suspected, our nation’s lax child abuse laws can leave victims and concerned parties unsure of their rights and without adequate recourse. (It doesn’t help that child protective services are overloaded and their mission in some places marred by negligence or major breaches of integrity.) On those occasions when spanking actually leads to criminal charges, defense attorneys have had remarkable success playing the discipline card.

For some predators, spanking serves as a grooming technique to erode boundaries and/or intimidate a child, paving the way for more clear-cut violations. For others, spanking is a paraphilic end in itself. The latter cohort is the focus of a 2013 crime thriller, 13:24, by M Dolon Hickmon, and although it’s a work of fiction portraying some fairly elaborate subterfuge, the author has said it was based on research of real-life cases. Another fiction writer, Andrew Vachss, who works as a lawyer and child advocate, featured this same theme in one of his novels, Down in the Zero, over twenty years ago. He would later remark on the plot’s parallels to a North American criminal ring that was broken up in 2000.

It’s important to reflect not only on the horror but also the psychological harm of these crimes. In addition to PTSD, loss of innocence, impaired trust, and possible family turmoil or grief for relationships lost, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual abuse to experience feelings of guilt and shame about what happened to them. These feelings can only be made worse by the idea of punishment — which is essential to a spanking, after all. One might literally hear “You should be ashamed!” in the process. Despite the vindication of having certain spankings reclassified as “bad touch,” it won’t be simple for a child to cast off the notion that he or she deserved them for being naughty, rebellious, sinful, bratty or whatever. For one thing, abused children often have love for and a sense of loyalty to their abuser, comparable to Stockholm syndrome, which makes it preferable to believe the abuser was in the right. For another, the message of disapproval wasn’t just expressed in words but transmitted through the body with painful blows. Science tells us that physical punishment can have a deep and lasting influence on a child’s developing brain (while at the same time elevating the prospect of medical problems in adulthood).

What’s more, victims of sexually abusive spanking, even if mercifully exempted from corporal punishment going forward, may have their trauma continually refreshed by secondhand exposure to the practice. Odds are they’ll occasionally witness it, hear a child threatened with it, or get accounts of it from their peers, extended family, the media, etc. At a minimum, they’ll be aware that spanking is a common form of discipline and that a lot of people strongly agree with it, or at least don’t think it’s a big deal. For these victims, this custom is more than just a trigger. It’s also a constant reinforcement of the narrative that links being spanked with “being bad,” where the child has little claim to sympathy and is more apt to draw scorn, with derision perhaps mixed in.

Some instances they encounter of legally and socially accepted spanking might be scarcely distinguishable from the acts of cruelty and perversion once committed against them. That’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for anyone to handle and especially for a kid. Likely compounding the burden is apprehension over how readily others would be able to process — and respond compassionately to — a disclosure of their past sexual abuse and exactly what it consisted of, however bizarre it may sound.

Mind you, this describes the plight of victims whose attribution of sexual intent is backed up by authoritative judgments, or at least some fairly compelling evidence, and who therefore can expect to be taken seriously. But for those who have only their own intuition that there was something untoward or creepy about one or more spankings they received, coming forward is a lot riskier. They may reasonably fear their perception will be scoffed at, pathologized, or made out to be a vicious lie. No wonder then if they keep it to themselves — which the “disciplinarian” in question may in fact be counting on.

There’s been ample discussion of spanking in relation to physical abuse. In 2014 the Adrian Peterson case brought its highest-ever level of media attention. How it relates to sexual abuse, though, is a topic that resists public discussion. It’s not that no one with a sizable audience has ever addressed it. As early as 1973, celebrity psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers warned readers of her advice column about “the unhealthy and degrading sexual implications of this kind of punishment.” More recently, author and journalist Jillian Keenan has been trying to wake people up to the reality of sexually abusive spanking through columns, interviews and videos. But there is very little appetite in the mainstream media for taking the baton, as it were, to further awareness of this issue that a few daring individuals have brought to light. The taboo has been tragic for countless children, who presumably were never warned that some adults may have bad reasons for wanting to spank them.

Here is a sampling of news articles that illustrate the nature and scope of the problem, along with links to two websites and a Facebook page where many more have been compiled. There are some in which sexual intent is not decidedly present yet which nonetheless hint at how corruptible this brand of child management is.

• School Head gets 18 months for spanking girl pupils
• Bus driver charged with spanking teens
• Charges against a high-profile evangelical pastor
• Principal fooled everyone — How Wadsworth hid his pedophilia
• Man reveals abuse he suffered at hands of former teacher and church deacon
• Jailed ex-Liverpool teacher and lawyer: Student wanted to be spanked 54 times
• Former Little League coach pleads guilty to spanking players
• Attorney says therapist violated client’s privacy
• Regrets of a Spanking Sitter
• www.spankingcanbesexualabuse.org, hosted by Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (whose work is cited in this 1987 column by Nat Hentoff).
• “Spanking Can Be Sexual Abuse” FB page (includes items more recent than those on the website)
• Southern Education (site created by author-activist Jeff Charles, with a focus on school paddling)

Although spanking has long been a major blind spot in child sexual abuse (CSA) awareness, one thing arguably helping to correct this is the #MeToo movement. Its extraordinary outpouring of accounts of sexual misconduct has included instances of unwelcome spanking (or talk of it). Here are some that appeared in the news media:

• What It Means When Women Say “Me Too” (see paragraph 3)
• ‘I was absolutely humiliated’: Alabama reporter who was spanked by boss tells her story
• Utah County commissioner accused of sexual harassment was previously investigated for spanking female students while he was a high school club adviser
• Ex-Artforum Publisher Knight Landesman Moves to Dismiss Lawsuit Brought by Former Employee Amanda Schmitt
• After spanking case, here’s why Drake should lead national effort to revise tenure to protect students
• There Are Still More Questions Than Answers In The Hugh Freeze Scandal (see paragraphs 23–25)

Supplementing this list, we have not only the accusations from 2018 against Missouri governor Eric Greitens (with spanking as one of various forms of assault alleged) but also a case from Tennessee reported many years ago. The latter involves charges of sexual battery, as opposed to harassment — yet with elements of a classic quid pro quo scenario. A former employee explained that the choice was “either she could be spanked or be fired.” Less conventionally, however, these options were presented as alternative forms of workplace discipline, in direct response to poor performance.

Whether these 19-year-old women initially bought that explanation, not seeing the acceptance of spankings categorically as a sexual favor, is unclear. If they did buy it, there’s a good chance they were conditioned from a very early age to view such treatment as a righteous corrective, if not also an expression of love (or caring, at least). What’s more, insofar as they attended school in Tennessee or one of the other states where school paddling remains legal, they may have been subject to spankings from their principal and other school staff all the way through their senior year (as in this federal case), which possibly overlapped with their time working at this job.

So if it’s OK for their principal at school to spank them to improve their behavior, then why not their boss at work? What makes spanking so damnable in a workplace setting while it’s perfectly fine in an upper-grade academic setting? To my knowledge, this double standard has yet to be examined in a court of law, but in the meantime we can at least ponder it in terms of how strong a sense of bodily integrity we want kids to have. Young women in particular don’t need these mixed messages if they’re going to be confident of their right not to be touched in certain places by men in authority.

Some student handbooks, in fact, identify spanking as a form of sexual harassment (example here, item 6 on second page). The requirement in many school districts that corporal punishment be administered by someone of the same gender as the student would seem moreover to be a tacit recognition of sexual connotations in opposite-sex paddling. (A commenter on Andrew Sullivan’s blog makes a similar point, and a Dallas-area teen who was paddled by her male principal recalled wishing a woman were present.) Yet these districts have no screening process designed to bar school staff members with a particular interest in corporal punishment from applying or witnessing it.

Innocence about this aspect of spanking is something that most of Dr. Stetzer’s fellow evangelical parents — if not most parents generally — would hope to preserve in their children for as long as possible (a goal made ever more difficult by pop culture, e.g., Monty Python, Madonna, Exit to Eden, Ally McBeal, Howard Stern, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Miley Cyrus). Unfortunately, that protective attitude does not serve kids well. Isn’t it better that a child be clued in as to spanking’s “adult” side, just in case he or she ever has to reckon with a would-be abuser whose M.O. relies on the imposing pretext of discipline?

It’s notable that the AP quotes a police officer speculating that the Red Bank, TN victims went along with the spankings up to a point because they had been “brought up to respect anybody who is an authority figure.’’ He could have added that people who have been trained at school as well as at home to associate authority with spanking are all the more likely to submit to the same kind of “chastisement” if proposed to them by employers, police officers, pastors, or judges.

Such a dynamic is seen more starkly in the degrading treatment that a young woman in Kentucky endured in 2004, which the movie “Compliance” eight years later was based on. To incite a brutal spanking, the perpetrator (impersonating a cop) first invoked the concepts of disrespect and punishment. That invocation likely would not have worked so well in a culture where spanking kids isn’t so prevalent and heralded.

Turning from fake cops to rogue cops, spanking has constituted at least one act of official oppression. The officer in question, Craig Murrah, reportedly asked his victim just before assaulting her, “Do you want to learn your lesson now or do you want to go to jail?’” One detail that makes this case even more frightening is that Murrah had previously worked in Fort Worth as a middle school teacher, a position where broad in loco parentis authority is firmly enshrined in Texas law. What’s more, he was accused of “inappropriately touching two students” during his time there. Since this was years before Fort Worth ISD banned corporal punishment in 1999, we ought to wonder if he participated in any school spankings.

While there’s reason to hope that our society in a generation or two will be “wise as serpents” (or a lot closer to it) regarding the potential for sexual exploitation via spanking, progress remains very slow. The blurred lines and blunted sensibilities that collectively persist when it comes to corporal punishment are well documented (for a sampling, see PTAVE’s page entitled “We already have laws against child abuse, don’t we?”) It was only eleven years ago that a woman allowed her daughter to receive a series of thrashings from their pastor as punishment for accusing a relative of molesting her. The pastor was charged with no more than misdemeanor battery.

We should not single out evangelicals as perpetrators or enablers of such abuse, who come from diverse backgrounds as PTAVE’s website amply shows. Nor are evangelicals alone in their naivety about the realities of this problem. It is also important to recognize that the consensus among them is far from absolute on the basic question of physical punishment. It would seem that as far back as the 1800’s, D.L. Moody opted not to use it in disciplining his children. Christianity Today very notably advises against it in a 2012 editorial. It’s not hard nowadays to find books, essays, blogs and so forth that use Scripture to make the case for a gentler approach to parenting, from authors such as Samuel Martin, Teresa Whitehurst, and Jeff Charles, to name just a few.

All that being said, however, to the extent religious leaders promote spanking, they have a particular responsibility to educate and foster vigilance concerning its role in child abuse — and not just physical abuse. For his part, James Dobson of Focus on the Family has written: “Anyone who secretly ‘enjoys’ the administration of corporal punishment should not be the one to implement it.” (Regrettably, he never ventures to say what should be done to prevent such a scenario.)

Sexually abusive spanking is a complicated and highly disturbing topic with far-reaching implications. Stories like those cited above can leave one feeling depressed and overwhelmed. It is nevertheless imperative for the welfare and safety of our children that we all become educated about this age-old problem. We must also allow that knowledge to inform our laws, policies, jurisprudence, and training for law enforcement officers and social workers.

Let’s get a sustained and public conversation going about this veiled form of sexual abuse. It is long overdue.