People who are pro corporal punishment need to wake up, I think. Even if they think they are doing it
right and are only for it under the right circumstance etc, their voiced opinion and support for corporal punishment is also enabling those who do it too much and those who abuse children. As an example, maybe you'd like to legalize a drug because you like to take it a couple of times a year. But that legalization also goes for the guy who takes that drug every day.
My conviction that corporal punishment has general negative long-term effects on the children punished and on society is not mere baseless assumption or opinion. It is based on a wealth of scientific studies.
Here are some findings and conclusions :
Corporal punishment is associated with the subsequent aggresion of children and there is recent evidence that later in life this aggression includes physical assaults on spouses.
Because corporal punishment occurs in over half of U. S. families, the findings suggest that elimination of this practice can reduce some of the psychological and social processes that increase the likelihood of future future marital violence and perhaps other violence as well.
Source : http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CP23.pdf
The decline in chronic and severe corporal punishment over the last several hundred years may help explain the long historical trend to less interpersonal violence. The findings in Chapter 7 and also a great deal of other research (Bandura and Walters, 1959; Eron et al., 1971; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, 1957) show that corporal punishment helps make many types of violence culturally legitimate. The differences between boys and girls are also consistent with this theory. It is reasonable to think that the greater likelihood of boys being hit contributes to the greater violence of men. It is time for society to develop ways to alert parents to the harmful side effects of corporal punishment of boys as well as girls.
Source : Beating the devil out of them ... - Google Bøker
The lower of the two lines shows that even when there has been no violence between the respondents' parents, a history of corporal punishment significantly increases the risk of husbands' assaultive behavior.
The parallel plot lines indicate that, regardless of whether there was violence in the current marriage, the more corporal punishment experienced as an adolescent, the greater the probability of physically abusing a child later in life.
The results in Parts A, B, and C of Table 1 have shown that corporal punishment is significantly related to depressive symptoms, suicidal thoughts, and alcohol abuse
The findings in Part D of Table 1 parallel those findings because they reveal that the more corporal punishment the subjects experienced when they were teenagers, the greater the risk that they will go beyond ordinary corporal punishment to acts that are severe enough to be classified as physical abuse.
Part C of Table 1 shows that increasing amounts of corporal punishment are associated with an increasing probability of alcohol abuse (high daily drinking or high volume binge drinking)
Source : Corporal Punishment Of Adolescents By Parents: A Risk Factor In The Epidemiology Of Depression, Suicide, Alcohol Abuse, Child Abuse, And Wife Beating - Research and Read Books, Journals, Articles at Questia Online Library
The findings support the theory that although physical punishment may produce conformity in the immediate situation, in the longer run it tends to increase the probability of deviance, including delinquency in asolescence and violent crime inside and outside the family as an adult.
Source : JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie
frequent exposure to corporal punishment increased the risk of dating violence
Source : JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie
The results indicated that batterers were more likely than comparison subjects to have been abused as children, to have witnessed their father beating their mother, and to have been disciplined as children with corporal punishment.
Source : ingentaconnect Exposure to Violence in the Families-of-Origin among Wife-Abusers...
Conclusion : Corporal punishment in general has negative (long term) effects on children and society as a whole.
Really, we should be past that debate by now. Those who support corporal punishment must do so despite the conclusions of studies like those referenced above and the wealth of other studies like them. They can continue to argue that corporal punishment is harmless, just like they can argue that evolution does not happen, but in that case; unless it's just a mere display of complete ignorance on the subject matter, they have a lot to prove and should find a wealth of evidence to support their position.