Corporal punishment persists in schools despite state ban

Nancy, a recently graduated primary school teacher, excitedly reported to her new station a few months ago.

On the first day, she was seated in the staff room when a male teacher in his 30s burst into the office pushing a 10-year-old boy ahead of him.

“How could you not finish the homework I gave you yesterday?” the teacher shouted as he scanned the room. “Today you will see who I am!”

Soon, he found what he was looking for; a one-inch-thick cane leaning on a wall in a corner of the room.

The Standard Five pupil was made to hold on to the teacher’s desk while the teacher thrashed his bottom. On the second stroke the child let out a loud scream.

At this point, Nancy expected the other teachers in the staff room to tell him to stop. Instead, one of them covered the boy’s mouth with his hand.

AFRICAN WOMANHOOD

The boy now used his hands to prevent the cane getting to his bottom, but a second teacher held the screaming pupil’s hands. The class teacher was now free to cane the boy thoroughly. When the teacher was spent, the others let the boy go.

“If you do it again, you will come back here for more strokes,” the teacher warned the boy, who could barely walk as he left the room.

Nancy soon realised that this was not an isolated case; the beatings occurred everywhere within the school compound.

What passes for corporal punishment varies across the country, from severe child abuse as witnessed frequently in a certain private school in Kilifi, to a few strokes of the cane on the palm or bottom.

Often, boys are caned on the bottom and girls on the palm, perhaps because bottoms are considered part of African womanhood, but the reasons are not clear. However, this loose rule does not always apply in many schools.

The issue of corporal punishment is emotive and those who support it say that even religious books warn against letting child offenders off the hook lightly. The book of Proverbs in the Bible, advises: “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him,” is often quoted in debates about the legal and moral grounding of corporal punishment.

Everyone, however, agrees that discipline is training of the mind and character, aimed at equipping a child with self-control and the ability to solve problems in future.

No doubt children require discipline to function in the world. When a child misbehaves, the adult in his or her life must find a way to help the child understand that some types of behaviour are not acceptable.

The most simple, least time-consuming tool available, and which gives momentary relief to the adult, is punishing the child.

PULLING THE EARS

However, there is a thin line between punishment and physical abuse, and many of those who go down the path of corporal punishment regularly cross that line, both at home and at school.

Studies related to parents who physically abuse their children have shown that over two-thirds of incidents began as attempts to change a child’s behaviour and teach them a lesson that became too severe or too frequent, resulting in serious physical abuse.

According to the 2013 Annual Unicef Report, the use of corporal punishment in young people is a global problem. Three out of four children aged two to 14 years, says the report, are subjected to some form of violent discipline either at home or at school.

The matter is so controversial that Kenya outlawed corporal punishment in its schools in 2001.

A paper published in the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science by a group of scientists from Narok University College in 2012 showed that despite the ban, teachers were still using the cane.

Prof Gerald Kimani and colleagues selected 250 pupils and 60 teachers from public primary schools in Starehe Division in Nairobi County for their study.

The results showed that despite the banning of corporal punishment in schools, 91 per cent of the children interviewed reported being caned.

One disheartening fact is that what passes for corporal punishment amounts to physical abuse of children, and researchers have found that other forms used as frequently as caning include slapping, kneeling down, pinching, forced manual work, and pulling the ears or hair.

About one out of every three children were shaken and thrown around, kicked, and made to stand in the sun for long periods.

Because corporal punishment is largely tolerated in Kenya, few cases are reported. Mercy Chege, the acting executive director of Childline Kenya, provided us with the only numbers available, which are reports of “alarming” corporal punishment reported in the country.

From January to May this year, there were 21 cases of corporal punishment that were reported, but Ms Chege says these are just the tip of the iceberg as most parents who come forward to report abuse of their children only do so when the child has been adversely affected either by physical injuries, dropping out of school, or being under stress.

However, teachers are in a dilemma. When the national examination results are released, school heads are hounded by parents if they register below-average results. The pressure to produce good results, therefore, is high, and parents are all too willing to turn a blind eye to corporal punishment as long as the children pass their exams.

Education officers, whose performance is also pegged on the average scores of the schools they oversee, are also not coming out strongly against corporal punishment.

WITHOUT HURTING CHILDREN

In the Starehe research, 80 per cent of teachers felt that the ban on corporal punishment should be lifted, as did 70 per cent of their head teachers. The teachers felt that the ban made students unruly as it took away teachers’ authority over learners.

Prof Kimani, who led the research team, recommends that teachers be trained on alternative ways of dealing with indiscipline.

“When the laws to ban corporal punishment were put in place, the stakeholders did not tell the teachers what to do instead of caning to instil discipline,” says Ms Chege.

“As we speak, this gap still exists. The training curriculum for teachers on alternative approaches to discipline should have been fortified 10 years ago to help the teachers maintain discipline and good performance without hurting children or breaking the law.”

The Society for Adolescent Medicine in 2003 authored a position paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health in which it reported that caned children and those who watch the beatings become timid. Corporal punishment also causes children to lose self-confidence, have magnified guilt feelings, and exhibit various anxiety symptoms.

Because of fear, the nurturing of open communication, so vital to effective education, is severely affected.

It is for this reason that Childline Kenya has partnered with Plan International to train teachers on alternative approaches to discipline.

Under the Improving Education Opportunities for Girls project in Kilifi, Plan International is running a pilot programme in six schools in Bahari and Ganze in Kilifi County.

Coordinator Solomon Jilo Asahl, a teacher for more than 11 years, has partnered with Pwani University lecturers Alice Anika, and Umi Kugula to create a programme to train teachers in the selected schools on guidance and counselling. Some 28 teachers are targeted initially and later, headteachers and chairs of the school management committees.

Trainers Pauline Wamboi and Mercy Chege believe that if teachers were able to talk to one another and work out their own corporal punishment motivations, they would easily be one another’s keeper.

This training is also being carried out in western Kenya with the support of the County Child Rights Network and the Department of Children Services.

Other than the risk of physical abuse, corporal punishment has other subtle but life-changing effects on children.

The position paper from the Society for Adolescent Medicine also reported that the caned child learns the wrong message — that the most important thing is not to stop their wrongdoing, but how to escape the caning. The star of the class will be the person who does the naughtiest things, yet is cunning enough to avoid a beating.

This is likely to be a problem in later life as such people do not own up to issues. Owning up, it has been instilled in them, only earns you a sore bum, so employees learn how to lie to the bosses and how to maintain the lie despite the knowledge that, as an adult, there will be no beating.

They have been programmed to evade owning up, and this is perhaps the reason no one in Kenya willingly resigns even when their mistake is obvious. Owning up is seen as a sign of weakness and naivety.

The rod has been broken on children’s backs, fixed, and re-used. It is time to turn to another part of the same book that some caning apologists use to explain their stand: the Bible. “Fathers, do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

There are few things in this world that are more exasperating and irritating to children than constant beatings, and perhaps that was what Paul was alluding to in that caution to the Ephesians.