Coping With the Legacy of Corporal Punishment of Millennials

When we were children, 80% of parents spanked their kids. 

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Are you fucking kidding me? My jaw dropped when I looked up the stats and saw this. 

Spanking is child abuse, with lifelong impacts that have been studied extensively. This is linked to trauma, to self-esteem problems, to aggression and mental health problems including anxiety and depression. 

And this is child sexual abuse. Specifically. This is about shame, nudity, humiliation, physical assault on private areas of the body, the violating of consent and trust, the violation of bodily autonomy. It can result in sexual dysfunction throughout life.

Child sexual abuse. I think on some level, we all know that. On the very face, that is clear; no matter how hard we may not want to face it, this is the material reality.

Calling it that, openly, is something we don’t want to do, because it opens a door to admitting this horror and the scale of this, and to recognizing the impact of this. It requires people to face the fact that what adults they trusted did to them — family members, parents, child care providers — was sexual abuse. 

The stakes for us in admitting it was child sexual abuse is really high. It forces us as a society to confront the fact that child sexual abuse has never been some rare instance, but rather is the overwhelming norm, and has been throughout history. 

It would mean a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as victims of child sexual abuse might see the their experiences and even their identity and stories abut themselves differently.

Sometimes I feel like our generation has decided that it would be infinitely less painful for everyone if we just live in denial abut it. And maybe that is true. 

Culture, of course, has gone way out of its way to normalize this practice and to remove it from the realm of abuse overall; at worst, parents who did this are viewed as well-intentioned if out of date. “Old fashioned” has consistently been the euphemism since our parents were children. If you are willing to look at this for what it is, you will see new and disturbing truths about the fact that human culture is organized around child sexual abuse, that parenting itself has been defined and structured by child sexual abuse. 

It also means that the vast majority of people in our age group have experienced child sexual assault.

There is very little public discussion about spanking; this in and of itself, speaks to the nature of this thing. The shame we feel about talking about spanking is the shame and the silence that exists around child sexual abuse; we act, collectively, like people act who have been sexually abused, in a culture that doesn’t permit discussion of it. We act traumatized and sensitive about it, uncomfortable, in denial. Actually, writing this post was really difficult because it makes me feel so uncomfortable to talk about. That deep, painful, twisty, skin crawling feeling…. Wanting to jump out of your own skin…  a feeling that you get when you have to face the reality of child sexual abuse. 

There’s a cultural attitude that parents who spank were doing what they thought was best for us or good for us, or simply that that was the way they themselves had been raised; as if this wasn’t acknowledgement of a cycle of violence playing out. And on a personal basis, people find themselves highly motivated to believe that their parents WERE well-intentioned. 

I would like to challenge this notion. Many parents spank out of anger, even in rage; many parents are sadistic to their children, many parents seek to punish their children inordinately and unfairly, and are physically violent and physically intimidating to their children. Humiliation is a standard parenting tactic.

They did this, knowing it was wrong and seeing it was wrong, and seeing what it was doing to these children. Both during the abuse and in the behavioral and emotional reactions that psychiatrists have documented for decades, stemming directly from this abuse.

Indeed, many people’s stories of growing up like this, involve events where the parent apologized or even broke down with guilt about doing this. In those moments of committing that act, they know what they are doing.

At what point in literally stripping a child and hitting private areas of their body, humiliating them, shaming them, seeing the reactions of the child in pain, seeing the reaction of the child to humiliation, are you thinking that this is okay? There is no way to see this and think anything other than you are seriously hurting a child physically, emotionally and sexually.

This makes it even more challenging; to acknowledge it as what it is, means also to acknowledge that parents who did this were *knowingly* harmful, and that there was absolutely a level of abuse, and the nature of this as abuse was abundantly aware to the perpetrators. It requires us to discard the notion that parents were just “doing the best they can” — this is simply and patently insufficient, and it is also disingenuous about what actually occurred. 

My main goal in writing this: to try to open a little space to talk abut a different side of our generational childhood, to confront shared sexual trauma and parental abuse, and to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

There are repercussions to this day for people who experienced this in their youth and are now adults and even parents themselves. The stakes of admitting this abuse are perhaps never higher: how do you reconcile the fact of experiencing child sexual abuse and your relationship with your parents today, for example. Your children’s grandparents?

It is fine for people to do any number of things with regard to their relationships with people who abused them as children. Some people want to forgive and move on, so that they can have better lives now. Some people go no-contact with their parents over abusive punishment in their youth. Some people talk to their parents about it, some don’t. 

But we know that we are in it together. 80% of parents using this practice while we were growing up, is just a staggering number. When I think abut it, that weight feels so very heavy. How to even contend with this? How to contend with the fact that this happened to so many? 

The comfort is that this is something we can do together and that we can contend with on a generational level. NOT talking about it, in my mind, is not desirable at all; especially because this practice continues to day and in fact, a number of millennial parents still use sparking. 

Spanking still remains at 25% and while it’s a fair bit down from the 80% that we faced as youth, it just isn’t acceptable that 25% *of us*, of a generation where almost everyone was spanked, are continuing this pattern. We should be addressing this inter-generationally and being the ones who are bringing it to an end and that obviously starts by looking at what was done to us and then using that knowledge, to act definitely to stamp it out. 

This is something that we should be actively talking to parents about and that everyone should be looking out for. All of us, INCLUDING those of us without children, have a responsibility to children broadly. This is a community responsibility, absolutely, and it is our collective responsibility as adults to stop this from happening, both parents and non-parents. 

We grew up in an environment where no adult interfered in another adult’s parenting, this special maxim so foundational as to supersede intervention in physical and sexual abuse. This was presented as some kind of natural law, the violation of which would somehow tear the very fabric of family and society. 

Must the opposite, it IS our job to make sure this child sexual abuse isn’t happening. In this case just as in most other cases of child sexual abuse, many people know about the abuse. This includes other parents, teachers, coaches, doctors, etc. Growing up, everyone knew this was happening to us!! And it was around us all of the time. Parents spanked their kids in public, in dressing and locker rooms, on the side of the road, at the pool, at school, when the child had their friends over, in bathrooms at Target. That is places just I, personally remember observing it happening growing up.

We were in this environment where this was not just playing out in homes, but was happening all around and actually saturating the entire environment we were living in as children, when this type of abuse of other children like us, was everywhere. And indeed the public nature of it, is often PART of the humiliation factor that was so inherent to this. So you end up with this, frankly very extreme scenarios, where an adult is actually doing the abuse in public, and because this is a sexual abuse, compounding just how awful this is. When you really open your eyes and think about this in materialist terms, it is truly horrifying. And it breaks my heart where we all grew up in an environment with such constant threat and presence of ourselves being abused and also seeing/knowing about the abuse happening to our friends and to children all around us. 

It was almost as if no where was safe; when it was also practiced by babysitters, in day care, by other family members, even by some schools at the time and so on. That is just no way to grow up, where no environment with adults is free from the threat, omnipresent in some way or form. 

For this to have been how the majority of children of our generation were treated by their own parents…  ugh. 80% of parents doing this to their children, and this being an act of serious violence, makes it one of the defining factors in our generational story. 

My approach to thinking about this is by making it open and generational. “We all went through something bad when we were young. Let’s talk about it.” We never even started talking about those things. And actually, that’s OK, because sometimes it isn’t until you are a bit older — when you are starting to have children of your own, when you reach the age of the person who spanked you, and more generally when you’ve had time to process or are having those issues come up. We see this in other cases of child sexual abuse, where confrontation with the reality doesn’t happen until later in life when that person has the adult tools and experiences that allow or force them to face it. 

But…. why? Why… this? Why this practice? 

I’ve written about child sexual abuse quite a lot on this blog, and in particular, looking at the structural reasons why it happens and what it achieves for the system. 

In my mind, this is one of the first major places that society exerts dominance on the child. 

In looking at cases of pedophile attacks and rings, for example, we often see that the most targeted groups are the ones most marginalized by society, indicating that pedophilia itself is operating according to rules of social oppression and is part of that. In the Catholic Church, pedophilia often functioned as a tool during colonization; in particular, the sexual abuse in Ireland by the Catholic Church, and the Catholic boarding schools in the US where so many Native children were sexually abused and in both scenarios, death of children. So we know that this doesn’t exist in a vacuum but rather a context of child sexual abuse being used as part of overarching attack.

In the case of corporal punishment, depending on the scenario, you have a lot of social functions being carried out. I think there are parts of this that can be related to impressing / hazing masculinity, “building” and challenging masculinity, and boys being subjected to this as part of a theatre of masculinity and subordination/dominance. In the school environment, this is about obtaining a docile student body, that is frightened and obedient and in which school, state and religious authority is impressed and policed. 

But overarchingly: this is how they broke us, both as individual children but also a generational body; taught us to submit, taught us to fear dissent, taught us to feel ashamed, taught us to feel totally powerless, and utterly reduced, taught us to feel sexual anxiety and humiliation. And this was done on a mass scale, and if you were not spanked multiple people of your friends were, and it was happening all around you.  

This was the context in which our generation grew up: this fear and hatred of the adults around us, because they were doing this to us and all our friends. 

In some ways, we will never know what our generation would have been like without spanking, because it affected the vast, vast majority of us. 

To make sure to address this issue, because I know it will come up. Even at the expense of making this even more uncomfortable and unpleasant! LOL. 

So of course this is to talk about the effect of spanking on our sex lives and to address the topics of spanking fetishes! A large number and in some studies, even some majority of people like to incorporate spanking or corporal punishment into their sex lives. And it seems … a lot of us in fact have spanking fetishes. This is definitely one of the most common fetishes and I think we can feel pretty confident about saying, that there is likely a link to the fact that spanking was an omnipresent part of our childhood and that so many people ended up with this specific fetish. 

We have been a generation of sex positivity, to a level that hasn’t been seen as far as sexual revolution since the 60s. Which is great! Sometimes though, like in this instance, I think we’ve so badly wanted to address stigma and shame that we have had trouble reconciling trauma and sexuality. In the case of a spanking fetish — I.e., not spanking of children but between consenting adults — there is a tendency to say that the fetish has nothing to do with trauma. Or, that this is a healthy way of resolving past trauma, in the event that the trauma is recognized. In general, the line is that “this doesn’t come from trauma”, because in that case, the act/interest would be stigmatized for its association with abuse. In my mind, it is more relevant to de-stigmitize abuse itself; then the association wouldn’t be as alarming off the bat and we could have a honest, material view of it.

Because the pretty obvious conclusion here is that spanking fetishes happen because spanking, a form of child sexual abuse, has a major presence in society. That can be by people who were spanked and people who weren’t; this comes somehow from an environment where there is this incredibly pervasive sexual abuse of children. I think it is true BOTH that it is totally fine to have a spanking fetish, and to acknowledge that it pretty clearly doesn’t happen in some kind of vacuum, but rather coming from this being in the environment. This doesn’t require us to judge anyone, tell anyone to change their sex life, or demonize this. Just to know that there is a context there.

 In the sex positivity movement, there’s been an effort to distance the fetish from the… oftentimes obvious context of it. And particularly with spanking fetishes you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious! As much as we can say that fetishes are normal and natural and so on, it does us all a disservice when we run from pretty obvious realities; and also excludes people who understand / know their sexuality to be related in some way to abuse. We risk furtherest alienating the people who themselves are traumatized, as the bar seems to be that your fetish does NOT come from abuse in order to have your sexuality accepted. I.e., the sexual impacts of child sexual abuse and etcetera on sexuality are not considered “normal” or okay, only the sexual deviation that comes from supposed non-abused innocence. 

Our generation has been really into S&M, anal sex, role play, gender play, all kinds of great stuff. That’s been super fun to watch and see and experience and especially living in San Francisco for a number of years, it was so fun it see the queer community come out for Pride and Folsom Street Fair. But when do we have a conversation about the other side of all of this, when we can talk about how sexuality IS impacted by trauma and at times is even a forefront consideration? 

Of course, for our consenting adults trying to have safe fun times, that is totally understandable that you might not want to have that context in front of mind while you are enjoying your relationships! But I think it is both possible to embrace and enjoy sexuality, AND also to think about context, to have good times between consenting adults, AND also think critically about this, and also to look at this, frankly, awful tragedy that happened to us, that has been so normalized that we often don’t think about this as a deeply scarring phenomenon that affects people throughout all of their adult lives. 

Because at the same time that we celebrate these things, we also have to face that fetishes are not necessarily easy things and people struggle with them, to accept them, to find understanding / fitting romantic and sexual partners. While destigmitizing fetishes is great, we should also problematize or complicate them where it is indicated. Some of these things are not desirable/positive experiences for everyone. It’s okay to have and enjoy your fetishes, and also recognize that our sexualities might look different, or that if it wasn’t for the broad-based child sexual abuse that afflicted our generation, that some of this shit might not even exist in our generational sexuality. 

These matters aside, here is the main reason that I open this can of worms: the most important thing in my mind is that we, as millennials, do not repeat this cycle and do not repeat this pattern of mass-scale physical and sexual abuse of children via this inhumane practice. If a child is being spanked in their house that is a very serious problem and a very serious abuse and that needs to be addressed. There is a social aspect here which is about policing parents, as peers and as generational peers, and making sure that no one is doing this. And yes, I did say “policing parents”. The idea that society has no stake in your parenting especially when it includes this abuse, it absurd; the idea that we should just allow parents to abuse their children because “you can’t tell someone else how to parent” holds up not at all compared to the magnitude of this problem. 

The culture of silence protects this phenomenon and allows the sexual abuse to continue.  I would like to suggest that that is unacceptable, that is culpability, and it repeats what we see around other cases of mass child sexual abuse, for us to turn away. 

Just because it happened to us doesn’t mean it should happen to anyone else. As our generation has become parents, 25% of parents still spank. 

What happened to us, it’s too late. But it’s not for these next generations. And we need to take on this multi-generational abuse and be the ones to end it. It’s not okay for you to do and it’s not okay for any parent you know to. 

Let’s end this, barbaric, sadistic, sick cycle of child sexual abuse parading as parenting or discipline.