• Court: Punishment over daughter's kiss was too harsh

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

    A woman who beat her 7-year-old daughter with a belt, leaving her with lacerations and bruises on parts of her body for at least a week, was not within her parental rights to mete out punishment that went beyond a “customary spanking,” a New Jersey court has ruled.

    The court’s decision reverses an earlier one in which another judge found the punishment was not extraordinary or excessive by K.T., the girl’s mother. (Only initials of family members were provided in the court documents.)

     

    The girl, S.T., told a family services caseworker that her mother struck her with a belt after learning that she had kissed a boy during kindergarten class. The Division of Youth and Family Services had been alerted to the injuries on the girl by a teacher on June 7, 2011. The agency determined the beating occurred around May 31.

    Pictures submitted to the court showed bruises on the girl’s arms, back, buttocks and thighs. She also had lacerations to her buttocks and right thigh, probably caused by the prong of a belt buckle, the Appellate Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court said in its decision issued Tuesday in favor of the family services agency.

    “We hold that K.T.'s acts against her daughter are excessive corporal punishment and support a finding that S.T.'s ‘physical, mental, or emotional condition ... is in imminent danger of becoming impaired as the result of the failure of (K.T.) ... to exercise a minimum degree of care,’” Judges Mary Catherine Cuff and Alexander Waugh said in their decision.

    In a recorded interview, K.T. said she struck her daughter with a belt for "a couple of minutes" because she had been sitting on a boy's lap and had been disruptive in school. K.T. said she only meant to strike her daughter’s buttocks, but the girl’s squirming around led to the other bruises. She also said she had used a belt to discipline her daughter in the past, according to the judges’ decision.

    When asked if she knew what she did was wrong, she replied, "No, because that's pretty much how I was raised," the court documents said.

    K.T., citing a prior New Jersey court case, said her actions fell within her constitutional right to use this type of punishment, and the record was void of “any objective evidence” that she had, in spanking her child, “recklessly created a risk of serious injury to S.T.”

    The court said the law didn’t prohibit corporal punishment, and that a parent could inflict reasonable moderate correction, but that was not the case here.

    “Multiple strikes with a belt to a seven-year-old child, which left bruises and marks all over the child's body that were visible seven days after the incident, is hardly the occasional discipline of a wayward or incorrigible teenager condoned by the Court” in an earlier case, the judges said. “Neither the school nor K.T. asserts S.T. exhibited other behavioral problems or was generally a difficult child. The punishment inflicted by K.T. is hardly a ‘customary’ spanking.”

    The earlier trial judge, identified as Union County Superior Court Judge James Hely by the New Jersey Law Journal, had granted physical custody to the girl’s father, M.H., and joint legal custody to both parents. It’s not clear if the custody arrangements have changed with the appellate court’s decision. The family services agency said confidentiality laws prohibited it from commenting.

    K.T.'s lawyer, Justin Walker of Piekarsky & Associates, told the law journal that she "may have been angry but I don't believe (her actions) crossed into the realm of abuse."

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  • At one Florida school, students make the paddles used in spankings

    By Sevil Omer, msnbc.com

    At Holmes County High School in Florida’s rural north, not only do naughty students get spanked, but the woodshop class makes the paddles, according to reports in the media.


    Eddie Dixon, the principal at the school in Bonifay, a small town 15 miles from the Alabama border, recently told a reporter from StateImpact about the shop class's product: a lightweight paddle made of ash wood, measuring about 16 inches long, 5 inches wide and half an inch wide. 

    “You can’t buy them anywhere,” Dixon said, according to StateImpact, a partnership of local public media and National Public Radio. “There’s not a market for them, so yeah, students make it.”

    The report didn't say how many paddles a school the size of Holmes County High, with about 500 students, might need. An attempt by msnbc.com to contact Dixon by telephone was not successful Thursday evening.

    Holmes apparently isn't the only Florida school making its own paddles. At Madison County Central's elementary and middle school, east of Tallahassee, townfolk make the paddles out of plexiglass, the dean of schools said, according to StateImpact.

    Florida is among 19 states that allow school staff to use corporal punishment, according to the Center for Effective Discipline. Other states allowing corporal punishment: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.

    More than 220,000 school children nationwide were subjected to physical punishment during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the Ohio-based center, citing the most recent figures available.

    Florida defines corporal punishment as the “moderate use of physical force or physical contact by a teacher or principal as may be necessary to maintain discipline or to enforce school rule.”

    In September 2011, the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act was introduced in Congress. But the bill, which would outlaw “paddling, spanking or other forms of physical punishment, however light, imposed upon a student," was referred to committee in the House and is seen as unlikely to become law. A state representative's attempt to pass a similar law also failed last year.

    So students like Lucas Mixon will face more spankings.

    “I been getting them since about first grade,” said Mixon, a junior at Holmes, National Public Radio reported. “It’s just regular. They tell you to put your hands up on the desk and how many swats you’re going to get.”

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  • Day care closed after spanking investigation

    By Sylvia Wood, msnbc.com

    State officials have shut down a family-run day care center in Emporia, Kan., after allegations that the owner used prohibited punishment, which could include spanking or slapping, on the children in her care.

    Pamela J. Gile received her license to operate the center on July 20, 2011, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

    Earlier this week, health officials alleged that Gile “used prohibited punishment” on children between Jan. 17 and Feb. 10, which besides spanking, could include verbal abuse, derogatory remarks and threats. The state issued an emergency order of suspension effective Feb. 14.

    No other details were released. Efforts by msnbc.com to obtain a phone number for Gile were not successful.

    “We can’t discuss any of it because it’s under investigation,” Barbara Hersh, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told msnbc.com.

    Gile’s license authorized her to care for up to 10 children ages two weeks to 16 years, depending on their number and ages. Hersh said information about the number of children in Gile’s home at the time her license was suspended will be available when the investigation is complete.

    Kansas, like most states, bans corporal punishment in child-care settings. But even in those states where it’s not illegal, authorities say corporal punishment can go too far.

    On Wednesday, the owner of a day care center in Seneca, S.C., was arrested on allegations that she beat a 4-year-old boy, according to WYFF4.com. Tracy Dawn Maxie, 42, owner of Maxie Mom’s Daycare, is charged with unlawful conduct toward a child, the NBC affiliate reported.

    Seneca Police Chief John Covington told the station's website: “In this case, we strongly feel that the line was crossed between administering discipline and committing a criminal act.”

    The child had "severe bruising on the upper back, buttocks, to the upper part of the bottom of the legs,” Covington told WYFF4.com. “Those injuries wouldn't have appeared from a single blow. It was obvious that corporal punishment went way too far.”

    Erin Wilkins of the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education, in Colorado, told msnbc.com that corporal punishment should be banned in all child-care settings.

    “Research links corporal punishment with negative effects such as later aggression, behavior problems in school, antisocial and criminal behavior, and impairment of learning,” she said.

    The National Association for Family Child Care, based in Utah, seeks to improve the quality of home-based child care through an accreditation program that requires providers to comply with 289 standards, including not using corporal punishment or verbal abuse in disciplining children.

    Of its 7,000 members, including current and former child care providers, 2,500 are accredited, according to Barbara Sawyer, director of special projects.

    The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against spanking as a discipline tool under any circumstances. A 2010 study published by the journal Pediatrics found that children who are spanked frequently at age 3 are more likely to be aggressive when they are 5.

    “There are ways to discipline children effectively that do not involve hitting them and that can actually lower their risk for being more aggressive,” said Catherine Taylor in a statement at the time. Taylor was one of the co-authors of the study and is an assistant professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health.

    “So the good news is, parents don’t have to rely on spanking to get the results that they want,” she said. “If they avoid spanking but instead use effective, non-physical types of discipline, their child has a better chance of being healthier and behaving better later.”

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