Banning corporal punishment, a map in motion

Sweden is the first country to explicitly ban all corporal punishment within the family, in 1979. The movement widened from the 1990s, driven notably by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

France adopted in 2019 a law introducing into the civil code a prohibition of physical and psychological violence in the exercise of parental authority. The text provides no specific criminal penalty, a point noted by supporters and opponents alike.

This law, often referred to as the law on ordinary educational violence, amends article 371-1 of the civil code, one of the articles read aloud during the wedding ceremony, which gives it a symbolic visibility its promoters sought.

The first register is repressive: the law creates an offence and its expected effect runs through sanction. The second is declaratory: the law states a norm, and its expected effect runs through changing representations and through what professionals can say to families.

Recently adopted laws mostly belong to the second register. That choice is defended as a condition of acceptability and criticised as a lack of bite, a debate data do not settle.

Swedish work documents a substantial fall in reported use and approval of these practices over several decades. The difficulty is that the fall was under way before the law, which makes attribution delicate.

Comparisons between countries that have legislated and those that have not find gaps in approval, but those countries differ in many other respects, and the law may be the effect of a change in opinion as much as its cause.

Use is measured by self-report. A law that makes a practice illegitimate makes reporting it more costly, which produces a measured fall even at constant practice.

Surveys that ask separately about approval and use do observe gaps between the two, and a fall in approval faster than the fall in reported use.

Some surveys get around the difficulty by asking adolescents or adults about what they experienced as children, which replaces the parent's reporting bias with those of memory and retrospective reinterpretation.

An abundant literature reports associations between corporal punishment and later indicators of conduct. A synthesis led by Elizabeth Gershoff is regularly cited to that effect.

Methodological criticisms bear on causality: families using these practices differ on many other dimensions, and difficult children may elicit more of them. The synthesis authors respond by drawing on studies that control for those factors, without closing the debate.