Corporal Punishment Bans in Global Perspective: Conceptualization and Child- and Caregiver-Reported Outcomes

Abstract

One of the most common forms of violence against children is corporal punishment—the use of physical pain to discipline or punish. Research suggests corporal punishment is harmful for children’s health and development. Corporal punishment is also a violation of children’s rights according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In order to prevent violence and promote children’s rights, some countries have banned corporal punishment in all settings, including the home. To date, 63 countries have bans. Yet, most research on bans focuses on high-income countries in Europe who were early adopters of the policy. Thus, much remains unknown about the process and outcomes of bans globally. This dissertation aims to address this gap with three distinct but related papers. In the first paper, I develop a conceptual model that considers bans as a multistage process. This process begins with countries’ contexts and ends with a transactional process between parents and children. I explore multiple mechanisms by which bans can reach people and argue that there is no single mechanism required for a ban to be effective. However, children’s schools may hold the greatest potential as a long-term mechanism by which bans can influence children and families. In the second paper, I use cross-sectional data from the third wave of the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being to examine the relationship between bans and self-reported child well-being. Using multilevel modeling accounting for clustering at the country and school levels, and controlling for pre-ban country-level covariates, I find that bans are positively associated with children’s subjective well-being, perceptions of family life, and feelings of safety at home. I also test child rights education as a mechanism of bans and find evidence for this mechanism among older children in the sample. In the third paper, I leverage repeated cross-sectional data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys to examine whether corporal punishment bans are associated with a reduction over time in the population-level prevalence of corporal punishment in low- and middle-income countries. Overall, difference-in-differences models do not suggest corporal punishment changed over time in nine countries that adopted a ban between time points. These papers advance knowledge about the processes of corporal punishment bans and in what contexts—and according to whose perspectives—bans might be impactful. Bans do not always lead to social change among children and families. Yet, bans are a long-term intervention with potential to prevent corporal punishment across contexts.