By: Emanuel Tirosh, Shlomit Offer Shechter, Ayala Cohen, and Michael Jaffe

Objectives: To assess physicians’ attitudes towards corporal punishment in childhood and their subsequent actions regarding the reporting of child abuse.

Participants: 107 physicians (95 pediatricians and 12 family practitioners) who work in hospitals and community clinics in northern Israel were interviewed. Of the participants, 16% were new immigrants.

Procedure: A structured interview was conducted by one of two pediatric residents.

Results: Attitudes towards corporal punishment were not influenced by the physicians’ sex or specialty. Corporal punishment was approved by 58% of the physicians. A significant difference in attitudes towards corporal punishment between immigrants and Israeli-born physicians was found (p = .004). Family practitioners and especially senior ones were found significantly less tolerant towards corporal punishment than pediatricians (p = .04). While reporting behavior was not found to be associated with parental status and the past experience of the physicians with child abuse, a significant effect of attitudes towards corporal punishment on reporting behavior was found (p = .01).

Conclusions: (1) Corporal punishment is still perceived as an acceptable disciplinary act by a significant proportion of physicians responsible for the health care of children in our area. (2) Attitudes towards corporal punishment are different between immigrants and native-born Israeli-trained doctors and, unexpectedly, pediatricians were more tolerant of corporal punishment than family practitioners.

Child Abuse & Neglect 27 (2003) 929–937

Edited by Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Rebecca Adams, Carol A. Heimer, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Tom W. Smith
D. Garth Taylor.

From the cover: In the past thirty-five years, Americans have become more fearful of crime and more punitive toward criminals—at least in the sense of being more favorable toward capital punishment and other harsh penal­ties. But at the same time they have become more tolerant regarding a whole series of social and civil liberties issues generally associated with a more humane attitude toward criminals. This new book analyzes survey data collected over the years, especi­ally from the Gallup polls and the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveys, in order to explore various aspects of these contradictory developments. The authors consider the hypothesis that rising crime rates cause increased fear of crime and that this in turn causes people to become more punitive. They find that exposure to high crime rates does cause in­creased fear but that fearful people are only slightly more punitive than other people. Furthermore, white people who live in high crime areas are no more punitive than peo­ple living in safer areas, and black people (who tend to live in high crime areas) are less punitive than people living in safer areas. To determine why the liberalization of public opinion on issues of race and civil liberties has not led to more tolerant atti­tudes on questions of crime and punish­ment, the authors examine in detail the relationship between general liberalism in regard to racial or civil liberties and more humane attitudes toward criminals. They also consider why increased fear of crime has not led to increased support for gun registration. This study breaks new ground by using recent innovations in the techniques of sur­vey analysis to study trends in public opin­ion and to analyze the causes of those trends. It thus represents a contribution to the lit­erature on subjective social indicators as well as a model for further explorations of the reasons for change in public opinion over time.

San Francisco, Josses-Bass Inc. Publishers. 1980. 168p.