By: Rose Ashraf and George W Holden

It is increasingly being recognized that children have the right to not be hit by anyone, including parents and teachers. This chapter focuses on the need to protect children from corporal punishment (CP) and represents an update to our chapter in the first edition (Holden & Ashraf, 2016). The chapter will review what is known about the use of CP in one country in South Asia: Pakistan. The chapter marshals the available evidence about the prevalence of CP in the home and schools, as well as problems associated with its use. We then examine the legal status of corporal punishment from the perspective of federal, provincial, and Shariah laws. Recent efforts at federal law reform will then be reviewed. The final section of the chapter will provide recommendations for advancing the protection of Pakistani children from CP and their right to safety.

Child Safety, Welfare and Well-being, Issues and Challenges, March 2022

By: John Tillson and Winston C. Thompson

In this chapter we analyze general views on punishment in order to consider what behavioural requirements schools may establish for students and which (if any) they may enforce through punishment, during compulsory education. Punishment, as we use the word, is the intentional imposition of burdensome treatment on someone – usually on the rule breaker – for having broken a rule, partly because the treatment is burdensome. By carefully analyzing various aspects of punishment, we aim to identify principles that should guide and constrain which behaviours schools punish, and how and why they punish them. In brief, we develop the following principles regarding legitimate requirements that can be made of students and the ways punishment may be used to enforce them. Before children are autonomous, schools may establish both paternalistic, and other-regarding requirements, but not requirements imposed from within comprehensive conceptions of the good. They may punish children in order to ensure a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of social arrangements. Schools may punish children for paternalistic reasons, including developmental reasons, but not for reasons of general deterrence. When children become autonomous, compulsory schooling may establish only other-regarding requirements of student conduct. They may punish to ensure a fair distribution of the burdens or benefits of social arrangements; this includes punishing for reasons of general deterrence, due to children’s responsible choices enhancing their liability, as well as for other-regarding developmental reasons.

We acknowledge that more or less detail may be given for operationalizing and implementing these principles. Given the generality of our task, we offer limited detail in this regard. A yet more comprehensive account would explain by what authority schools may make and enforce requirements, and to what extent (if any) students or parents should have a role in the deciding requirements. For our present purposes, we highlight that however this authority is distributed, there are better or worse decisions that can be made. In this chapter, we seek only to guide the content of these decisions through identifying appropriate goals for and constraints on school discipline.

Pedagogies of Punishment The Ethics of Discipline in Education, Bloomsbury