Crime and Punishment - The Story of Corporal Punishment Timeshift

I think there is some use of corporal punishment. Are you in favour of this?

Yes, now and again, I think it does wonders!

Corporal punishment,

the infliction of pain to punish, was once part of everyday life.

Can we have a show of hands? How many of you have never, ever hit your children?

Thank you.

Well, strangely enough, belting works.

It makes a good child better!

This is not only the story of punishment in schools.

Corporal punishment has been part of religious life and of the law.

Well, on the eighteenth one I don't think I could have stood any more.

It has been used in the nursery and in the bedroom.

All we are saying here is that there is a sadomasochistic element

running throughout society.

Corporal punishment has been used and advocated by reasonable people

who have argued forcefully for its merits.

This is over in a few seconds and it's a salutary lesson,

it's a short, sharp lesson.

It connects with strong human instincts.

We hear of an elderly lady

taking her pension from the local Post Office, knocked to the ground,

and kicked about the head, I think we all have a visceral reaction -

why doesn't somebody punch this person?

I think that that is almost a human instinct.

Well, why can't we have a deterrent to protect ourselves?

Corporal punishment has deep roots in British culture

and its slow decline reflects a battle that has raged

for over 200 years.

Those debates about what is legitimate,

how much force can you put in to it,

who's entitled to inflict it, who are the victims,

have actually been going on for a very, very, long time.

Corporal punishment is often associated with the schoolmaster

and the cane, but it once had a role throughout society.

If we went back to the 18th century,

we'd be pretty horrified by attitudes to other people's pain.

The 18th century public could both witness and join in with the infliction of pain,

such as the pillory, the most unpredictable of punishments.

In London, the pillory, or one of the pillories was, at Charing Cross,

where the statue of Charles I is now

and it was the site of great excitement.

And there was this poor man or woman in the pillory,

abused by crowds of common people.

This was the common peoples' sport

because they were expected to come along with dead cats and oranges

and eggs and such rotten fruit from Covent Garden as they could collect from the gutters

and pelt this, the poor victim and the polite people

would be in their coaches and they kind of watch

this sensation and congratulate themselves on their refinement

that they didn't indulge in this.

But there was never a sense of pity

for the poor wretch being stoned.

Even women were not spared the indignity of public punishment.

For petty thefts, petty larcenies, a woman was tied to the cart

and she had to follow it like this, bare-breasted and bare-backed,

through the market square being humiliatingly beaten.

One way of explaining all these violent attacks in past times

is through realising that the state in early modern times

in the 16th, 17th, even 18th centuries was relatively weak.

We have to remember that it was defended by

a few thousand soldiers and by a few thousand parish constables

and the wonder is that it all held together.

And one reason that it held together was because of the violence that

could be deployed by this minimalist state.

The humiliation and the pain were a necessary part of punishment,

the mere deprivation of liberty was not enough.

Prisons were seen really as places where offenders were held

awaiting trial and when the trial had been conducted

the expectation was that they would be subjected

to corporal or capital punishment in the vast majority of cases.

The violence of the meted out by the state found its justification

in the teachings of religion.

The idea of a physical hell had always been used to underpin

the idea of corporal punishment that if one accepts

that God inflicts pain on people

then by analogy it is perfectly possible

for people with power to inflict pain on those

they want to bring into line.

So once you have this model of pain as something inflicted

by a judgmental God, a God who punishes,

who exerts retribution for sins

then, of course, pain becomes something even acceptable.

It's something that God inflicts on sinning mankind

and, therefore, we can therefore inflict

on those beneath us, children, women, our slaves, so called "savage races".

So there is that sort of hierarchy of infliction of pain.

Corporal punishment was not only about retribution,

it could also benefit the soul.

Is pain a way of imitating Christ, of, if you like, getting rid

of your evil, evil nature, your sins here on this earth,

so that you don't have to sort of suffer in the next life?

But in the course of the 19th century, such views began to change.

The infliction of pain in public disappeared.

One reason was that the growing state could draw on other forms of punishment.

Prisons were coming into favour.

The machinery of control was becoming more sophisticated.

The whippings, chastising, the burnings and the brandings

and the hangings were no longer necessary

because of a world which was now being better policed.

Whipping moved indoors but it didn't disappear.

Criminals could still be flogged and in English prisons,

it was a punishment for mutiny or violence used until 1962.

The doctor would come to your cell

and would certify that you were fit for the punishment.

You'd then be escorted to the flogging room,

where there existed an apparatus called "the Triangle"

and your legs were spread-eagled,

your arms were spread-eagled above your head.

A protective device was fitted around, just above your buttocks

to protect your kidneys,

and a proscribed number of lashes were laid on.

Well, you were strapped to this triangle by your legs

and then they pulled you up as tight as ever they could pull you

on the triangle, and then they fixed the ropes up

and then the governor says,

"All set? One!" And down it comes like a ton of bricks.

It nearly knocked all your entrails through you.

It knocked all the wind right clean out of you.

It was just like a house falling on you.

People say you can't feel the next one,

but I tell you, you feel every one.

Well, on the eighteenth one, I don't think I could have stood any more.

Your back's just like a bullock's liver.

It may sound brutal but with no cheering crowds,

no revelling in the humiliation,

this punishment was seen as progress.

As the 19th century went on,

a driving force behind reform was a new evangelical Christianity.

Once you start getting this increased notion of a benevolent God

who actually is a loving father who wants to nurture

his children then, of course, it's a very different model.

Just like God wants to nurture and look after you,

you, therefore, have to do the same thing with those beneath you.

Campaigners targeted uses of corporal punishment in private.

Wife beating became increasingly unacceptable.

The scandal that had most impact

was somebody beaten to death by her husband in 1854, which caused

a big furore and a campaign against wife torture and the idea that

you could beat your wife legitimately became less and less acceptable.

Wives may have had less to fear but children weren't off the hook.

Corporal punishment was thought particularly suitable for young criminals.

Punishment of youth by caning or birching as a sentence of the court

was actually regarded as quite progressive for the time,

because the great fear was that a young person would go to prison

and become contaminated.

It was regarded as a more rational option to take a young person

and to cane them rather than send them to prison.

There's still, until very, very late in the century, this notion that,

you know, that there is some evil in all of us

and in order to reap the benefits of the afterlife

we actually have to have that sinning nature, if you like,

beaten out of us as a child.

It was a view that was to remain prevalent for years to come.

I think there is something to be said for original sin.

No, I think they have to be trained to fall in with the ways of our society.

Most children respond, but there are a few rebels, if you like, or misfits

who do not respond very readily and some special attention has to be paid to them.

In the late 19th century, as other forms of corporal punishment

were being banned, its use in schools, actually increased.

The 1870 Education Act

introduces public elementary schooling for the first time

and ten years later, in 1880, it becomes compulsory for all.

And that period was a very dramatic one, where

School Attendance Officers, literally, were dragging children into school.

In Elementary Schools you had very large classes and discipline

was a problem for many teachers.

With conflict in the classroom and growing pressure on teachers from

humanitarian campaigners, new and powerful justifications

grew up for the use of the cane.

The National Union of Teachers in 1900,

explicitly forced the government

to retain their right to inflict punishment.

Corporal punishment is necessary, according to lots of these teachers

for working class children, because they are already brutalised, that

they are used to corporal punishment in their own homes

and, therefore, if teachers don't do it,

they will be regarded as a soft touch.

It wasn't just about the classroom.

This was about the future of the country.

At the beginning of the 20th century, people are particularly

exercised about the question of Britain's place in the world.

They start commenting about the "un-flogged French" and the way in which their

criminal malpractices reflect their not beating their children.

They talk about the Boers as a worthy opponent in the South African wars,

because they flog their children in the proper British way.

So it gets tied in with the idea of a training in imperial masculinity.

Corporal punishment is required for people in public schools

because you have to harden them for the Empire.

You have to harden them for public service.

It teaches them these vital traits

that they are supposed to, they require if they are to lead.

Where better to see this training in practice, than at Eton College,

training ground for the leaders of Empire.

The 4th June at Eton.

On this great day, the college presents itself to its own world

as its own world likes best to think of it

as the preserve of the English ruling class and the source of most of their virtues.

This is what used to be called "the Top Drawer".

To most of these people, it would be unthinkable to send their son anywhere else.

When Eton opened its doors to the cameras for the first time in 1964,

corporal punishment was still central to the school's ethos.

The ultimate sanctions of this society are, of course,

punishments of one sort or another.

Members of Library can give lines and the captain of the House

can beat boys, but nowadays only by permission of his Housemaster.

Private schools educated large numbers of the elite and it is that sentiment

of "What I had experienced was good for me because it made me the man I am today"

that has helped to sustain the belief in corporal punishment and therefore support for the practice.

The only useful thing I ever learned at Eton was to take a beating.

We didn't feel degraded at all by it.

We took it as a natural course of events.

BOY!

At Eton, as in the rest of society,

corporal punishment went hand in hand with a strict hierarchy.

Two tins of peaches and a pound of sugar, please. Thank you. OK.

These two sixth formers, one an Oppitan and one a Colleger,

act as the Headmaster's representatives for one week.

They're called "Preposters".

During their week of duty, they do no school work.

What they are concerned with now is the "Bill", the list of boys who are summoned to see the Headmaster.

The Preposters are very much aware that they are the Chief Magistrate's

representatives, no knocking on doors.

-Is Roach in this division, sir?

-Yes.

He's to see the headmaster at quarter past twelve.

The masters beat people in addition to that, the boys beat each other.

They fag for each other.

They start as servants and end up as masters.

They start by being beaten for their own good and then beating people

for their good, so there is a kind of self-replicating notion that

beating is great and beating goes on.

What kind of life you have at Eton depends very largely on

the kind of boys you have at the top of your House.

Under an enlightened captain of the House, life can be very pleasant

but with an unenlightened boy and a bad Housemaster, it could be a misery.

What went for Eton went for other public schools.

The usefulness of corporal punishment was rarely questioned.

-Yes?

-Can I beat Dormitory Four for pillow-fighting after lights out?

-Who caught them?

-I did, sir.

-Have they had a warning?

-Several times for talking, sir.

-And they've been warned for ragging as well?

-Yes, sir.

-Well, carry on.

-You better beat them.

-Thank you, sir.

These schools are closed societies.

You pay a large amount of money to send your children there

and, as a consequence of being there,

they become part of a sort of club, or social order,

so the inclination of everyone connected to the school is that

the school should run itself as it pleases and no-one should interfere.

Outside the public school tradition quite different ideas

were circulating about the correct way to train a child.

Oh, Lindsey. Come on, sausage!

From the early 20th century,

child psychologists had been arguing against corporal punishment.

They were eager to spread the word.

The vast majority of parenthood books argued, if you hurt a child

as part of your educational process you gave the child a belief that

hurting was what you did to other people

when they had done something wrong.

You thus created cruelty and violence rather than preventing it.

What about children though?

If you had them and when they were naughty, what would you do with them?

Oh, just give them a scrub.

THEY GIGGLE

From psychology studies to parenting books, the dominant message was that corporal punishment was wrong.

It wasn't a deterrent and it could confuse the child.

By the 1960s, those keen to educate parents had a voice on television.

We tell them all sorts of things.

Lots of things, "Don't do this, don't do that,"

and they have to try and make sense of everything we tell them.

What does your mummy do when she sees bed covers

all over the place and beds turned upside down, what does she do?

-Give us a smack.

-She does?

-Yeah.

-And does it stop you doing it again, when she gives you a smack?

-No!

-Yes, it does!

-It stops you? Does it stop you, John?

-No, not so much.

It doesn't stop you so much?

He gets two smacks if he does it again.

Supposing that Mummy would explain to you why it's wrong,

do you think that would help?

-Yes.

-Why?

-I don't know.

-You don't know why?

Don't you think smacking is as good or do you think its better to explain to you?

I think explaining would be a good way.

Why do you think it would be a good way?

Well, it would show why you shouldn't do it.

-Maybe it would stop you from doing it.

-You think so?

-Yes.

But the methods advocated on TV and in books did not always find

favour with the parents.

Even though the evidence put forward by child psychologists in particular

very, very strongly suggest that corporal punishment is ineffective

and it probably is counter productive.

Actually, a lot of parents are not taking that on board.

What's the worst thing that can happen to any of you when you've done something wrong?

A daddy smack.

A daddy smack?

Not a mummy smack, well, Mummy smacks quite hard

but it's less than Daddy's would be like.

There's this hostility or anxiety about, "Well, who are they to tell me what to do?

"This is the way my mother did it. This is the way my father did it,"

that is passed down through the generations and somehow these child psychologists

are intervening into the domestic sphere in a way that they do not have the right to do.

John, please. John. John, I shall smack you.

John Ladbury and his wife have four young children,

beat the children when they misbehave.

Children, it's bath time.

Caning is an effective deterrent,

the gentle approach, they believe, is a useless one.

But do the Ladburys admit to being the strictest?

Oh, yes, I think so. Yes, we are very strict, in as much,

well I should think we come under the heading of "older discipline".

-Oh, I don't know.

-Well, we do use the cane.

-Oh, yes, indeed.

-We do cane them.

-Yes, yes.

-For what sort of thing?

-When they get...

Hooligan, hooliganism is a thing we can't tolerate.

I mean, when they start leaping about on the furniture

and that sort of thing, we'll warn them several times

and if they continue, well, then "bend over,"

-and we cane them.

-How hard do you cane them?

Well, it stings but, you know,

it hurts me more than it does them I'm sure,

but they have a little weep and then they're quiet, they sleep

and the next morning, it's all forgotten.

Are you sure it's all forgotten the next morning?

They never mention it, they never seem to...

Well, even if it isn't, so what?

THEY LAUGH

Mother and father were the head of the household,

"What right do these outsiders have to come and tell us

"what we should be doing within our four walls?"

Is there anything your mummy and daddy do that you don't like?

Yes, something what I really don't like, when they smack me.

"Hmm, naughty boy!"

Corporal punishment remained such a normal part of life

that in popular culture it took on a distinctly humorous flavour.

In its comic representations,

corporal punishment, is kind of the risk that a high spirited boy runs.

So, Dennis the Menace always gets the slipper

because he's a menace but, you know, we love him for being so.

Only creeps don't get beaten.

In the 1950s, there is no doubt that corporal punishment

was associated with jokes.

I mean, in writing there's Molesworth Down With School 1953 which,

I can still remember had a page - "Kanes I have known."

They've all got different names, different types and they are drawn for you.

And it was hilarious, you know. There was Old Faithful,

the standard cane, there's the one with the swishy end, there's the one

with the telescopic sight on it,

there's the one that's like a wonderful carbon fibre fishing rod.

And those are, "Kanes I have known"

and it goes with "Tortures And Grips Of The Masters."

You turn over and there's the clipping someone with a ruler, or punch at the numbskull hit

and it was thought to be hilarious, with lots of cartoons by Ronald Searle.

And that coincides with a little bit later Whack-O! on television.

-I'll hear no more of it.

-Sir...

Don't argue with me, boy!

In this school, I am the law.

Le lois c'est moi!

Et Jim le loi,

and I am not only the judge I'm also the jury.

And I'll tell you something else I am.

I heard you say that!

All right, fat pig or not, my boy,

I will not stand for insubordination.

You will all report to my study immediately after prep for a dose of Jim's immaculate,

magical, cure all!

Oh, it looks like we've only made things worse.

Billy Bunter who's beatings at the end of almost every story

at the hands of Mr Quelch are regarded by the storytellers, jolly good comeuppance.

You know, we're not supposed to think, I fear,

"Poor Billy Bunter, what an awful school, someone give him some psychotherapy."

We're supposed to think "What a coward.

"Just typical of him."

-Oh, law!

-You're wasting time, Bunter, turn round.

The laughter seemed to precede a change of mood.

In the 1960s, the anti-corporal punishment message

suddenly reached a new audience.

In the funny way that popular culture reflects things

there's something going on that creates anxiety

around corporal punishment.

The film Spare the Rod, 1961, is about a supply teacher,

played by Max Bygraves, Mr Saunders, who arrives

in a school in the East End of London, Worral Street School, a difficult school.

There's a scene at the beginning of the film where Saunders comes in

and is first introduced to the headmaster.

A hard bitten, cynical Donald Pleasance,

the chain-smoking, coughing, Donald Pleasance,

who is under great pressure to hold this school together.

And the idealism of the new man, the supply teacher, is completely

contrasted with this guy who's been in the business all his life.

He sees it almost as a battle to keep discipline.

Always cane on the left hand and leave the other for writing,

unless you have to give two strokes then it can't be helped.

-I see.

-Make sure the arm is held out horizontally, then if you miss the hand,

there's no risk of catching him across the body. You can't be too careful.

-Thank you.

-Oh, by the way, when you cane them you have to enter it in the Punishment Book.

Thank you, but I'd like to try a few other methods first.

It's up to you. If you can get along without it, so much the better

but with class two, I don't think you've got very much chance.

Most school films are on the side of tradition.

This completely reverses that from the word go.

Newfangled is good and old traditional is bad, because actually

it's got sour, cynical, doesn't believe in themselves,

no self esteem and doesn't believe in the children either.

There's a boy in class played by Richard O'Sullivan called Harkness,

who begins to understand and identify with the Max Bygraves character,

but there is a riot in the classroom and the perpetrators that riot say,

-"Why isn't Harkness getting beaten as well?"

-What about Harkness then?

Yeah, what about Harkness? He was shouting too.

-Yeah, what about Harkness?

-He was making more noise than anybody.

-Bet you don't cane him.

-Teacher's pet! Blue eyes!

Be quiet!

All right, come on. You too, Harkness.

'Actually, Harkness was trying to stop the others from rioting,'

but Bygraves doesn't know that so he whacks him as well as the others.

Go and sit down.

So you haven't just got resorting to the cane,

you've got injustice as well.

All the gains that have been made in the first half of the film,

of getting this boy's confidence, are completely shattered in that moment.

And the injustice of it, the resorting to the cane,

the fact that Bygraves didn't believe him, all those things come through and it snapped.

There's no trust between teacher and student any more.

It's a very important moment.

Why did you join in with them? Against me?

I didn't, I was trying to shut 'em up.

Oh, I should have known that, shouldn't I?

Yeah, you should, shouldn't you!

The film's moral is clear.

The use of the cane is destructive, embittering. It creates rebellion.

It was a view that would be represented even more vividly in the 1968 film If.

You three have become a danger to the morale of the house.

By the time of If, it's a state of the nation movie almost.

It's not just about the school,

it's about the establishment, it's about rebellion

and it's about how the establishment sustains itself through violence.

You should be prepared to set an example of responsibility.

You're a damn nuisance.

And as such, you must be punished.

And my goodness, they really go for it. It is a terrifying scene.

In fact at the time, I remember reviewers compared it with the Gestapo, that scene.

You know, it's like a scene in a concentration camp movie.

Not just because of the thrashing but because you've got the horizontal bars

in the gym, you've got the boys going in and when Travis goes in, Malcolm McDowell,

he puts out his hands on the horizontal, it's clearly a crucifixion that's going on.

I mean, that's very clear.

So it's much more than just a flogging.

Wait till you are told! Get down.

This is a ritual humiliation and it's going to sow the seeds of revolt.

So you get the beating and then "Dissolve, Resistance" is the next chapter heading.

That is the last straw.

In the '60s, they did talk about collapse into disorder if it disappeared,

but then there were films, like Lindsay Anderson's If,

that indicated the opposite,

that it actually caused a collapse into disorder.

If's final scene was always meant to be a fantasy.

Travis, the revolutionary, fighting the massed forces of the establishment

with their obsession with tradition and discipline.

But the potential for corporal punishment to lead to rebellion

was beginning to be played out in reality.

In 1972, school children took to the streets.

Trafalgar Square, May 17th, the forces of law and order are on standby for trouble,

ready to turn away a march of London schoolchildren organised by the Schools Action Union.

Among those demonstrating are many who say they are angry

at being treated by teachers as though they were less than human.

Some young people here, see the movement as a way of bringing the class struggle into the classroom.

The school strikes were initially about...

They were very much issue based,

and had some very specific aims, which were very relevant to all children in schools really.

It's not just the uniforms, it's the caning that matters.

Corporal punishment was very significant to their campaign.

In public schools there was always the history of children should get

six of the best, but I'm actually not sure it happened as much there

as it did in a lot of the state schools, particularly in secondary moderns.

Children from all over London, just kept on arriving

and there were hundreds upon hundreds of children.

What they did was, they split us into groups and they kept herding us all over the place,

the main idea being to stop us getting into Trafalgar Square.

The demonstration should have taken place here, in Trafalgar Square at 11 o'clock, but it didn't,

because the police cordoned off the Square and refused to allow any of the children in.

A crowd gathered on the steps on the far side of the Square decided to go to Hyde Park.

The demonstration attracted plenty of media interest.

From her parents' house in London, Liza Dresner acted

as a representative for the Schools Action Union.

I can remember a very a funny moment when I was asked how many members the Schools Action Union had.

How many members do you have?

We never give out membership figures.

-It's policy that we don't give out membership figures.

-Why not?

We never have done and we will never do. It's part of our tactics.

And I cobbled together some kind of answer.

The fact was, we had no idea.

If people are unaware how many of us there are, they never know if they've smashed us or not.

But there are grown-ups, not schoolchildren, in your organisation,

who are influencing it all?

No, certainly not. Obviously we accept advice from everybody.

People who respect us, we respect.

'All of us got deeply frustrated by the fact that everybody seemed to be'

looking for these hidden adults,

because it just carried on this myth that children cannot think.

There's nobody pulling strings, there's no, sort of, person paying us.

I wish somebody was, we haven't got any money.

But there's no one individual who's paying us and saying,

"You do our views and we'll give you so much money."

We're just working with school students and teachers fighting for revolutionary change.

We were thinking for ourselves. We were making our own decisions.

I'm very proud of the way we reacted during that time.

I think what the SAU did and what the strikes did was bring

corporal punishment as an issue to the forefront of discussion.

It was extraordinary. I think a lot of children who came out were extraordinary.

They took amazing risks.

Just a year later,

inner London schools did abolish the cane but only in primary schools.

In the judicial system, by contrast,

corporal punishment had been banned since 1948.

In the reforming mood of the 1960s, young offenders who might have once

been birched, were now described as victims of society.

All this created a backlash.

Let Mr Butler get his head out of the fluffy clouds of idealism.

LAUGHTER

And I say this very seriously.

Let him be a man and let him reintroduce corporal punishment for these young offenders.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

This is the instrument of punishment and deterrents

that people here on Clydeside, many of them, want to see brought back.

Pressing the button...

With growing fears about violent crime and delinquency,

calls for a return to the short, sharp shock were frequent.

In Glasgow, a society was formed to bring back the birch.

The members of the society working actively in the campaign, defended their attitude vigorously.

Let me quote you what one of those boys said.

He said, "Nine times I felt this thing coming down on me and I just screamed and screamed and screamed."

And what a coward he must have been, because think what he must have done to merit that.

Think of it? And think of some of the people like the policeman,

who was blinded in the course of his duty,

that's a life sentence that he's got.

There's another person that I spoke to who has ended up in a mental home for life.

When we hear of an atrocious crime, I mean,

we hear of an elderly lady taking her pension from the local Post Office,

knocked to the ground and kicked about the head,

a little bit of money stolen, I think we all have a visceral reaction -

"Why doesn't somebody punch this person?

"Why doesn't this person be subjected to some of the indignities

"that they have been imposed on this innocent person?"

I think that is almost a human instinct.

Why do you want to see the birch brought back?

Well, I would say my reasons are, because, at the moment,

I feel the penalties being imposed for crimes of vicious assault

are not really bringing these assaults to an end.

They are not having the desired affect.

It's against this background of increasing crimes of violence

that the movement is growing for the reintroduction of the birch.

It gathered momentum last July after an incident in the Isle of Man,

when four Glasgow youths of 19 were convicted of assaulting two sunbathers.

It was a serious assault.

One of the sunbathers had his jaw broken and had to have five stitches put in his head.

The youths from Glasgow were fined a total of £80 but that was not all.

They were taken downstairs and each given nine strokes of the birch.

This led to enormous publicity here in Scotland

and many letters to the newspapers, welcoming this use of the birch.

I think in a case like that, the birch would be a more effective deterrent than probation.

Birching may have gone from UK courts, but in the Isle of Man,

its use for young offenders increased in the '60s.

Many on the mainland looked on with envy.

The Isle of Man is the last place in Europe which allows corporal punishment by the state,

the last place where a policeman can cane a child of eight, or birch a boy of 14.

And the reason that birching was retained in the Isle of Man was

the Isle of Man wanted to maintain its distinctive

image of itself.

Small towns, small communities, offenders come from the outside.

It was a very big holiday resort until quite modern times,

such disorder as there was came from those ruffians

in Liverpool and Merseyside who descended

on the island and misbehaved.

The majority of Manxmen support the laws on corporal punishment

because they fear that the tourists who treble the population

during attractions like the TT Races bring hooliganism with them.

They see Britain, which they call the adjacent island,

as a thug-ridden country where no-one is safe to walk the streets at night.

They think the birch helps to preserve the Isle of Man as a safe and civilised haven

and the birching issue is just part of their bid to run the island

the way they want, without any interference from Britain.

I think people do see it as a feature.

When I've been across on many occasions, one of the first things

people greet me with, "Oh, you live on the Isle of Man, you've got the birch.

"You're one of the few civilised places that are left."

But by the late 1970s, the tide was turning against the Isle of Man, at least in Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights was to pass judgment on the birching of a boy for assault.

The Manx people took to the streets to defend the birch.

The big political story comes to a climax tomorrow in Strasbourg

where the Manx birching laws go on trial before the European Court of Human Rights.

On the outcome of this depends future relations between the Manx and British governments.

Do you think this is a civilising that you have corporal punishment,

that you inflict pain on others, is that civilised?

If they deserved punishment, I think it's an excellent idea

and the removal of it would be absolutely disastrous.

Turn round, Rita!

LAUGHTER

Do you feel that? Of course you don't!

I mean, there's... I don't know what all the fuss and bother's about.

This is over in a few seconds and it's a salutary lesson.

It's a short, sharp lesson instead of a short, sharp prison sentence,

which is costing the country so much money.

The prisons are over-flowing in Britain.

The Isle of Man's birch rod was actually made of hazel twigs,

soaked in salt water to increase their flexibility and strength.

This is a birch rod.

They must not be longer than 40 inches, the overall weight

must not exceed nine ounces, and the open end, when splayed, must not exceed six inches.

The person who's to be punished is brought into this room, through this door,

and he stands by this table.

He's instructed to unfasten his trousers

and drop them to the ground and he's to lean across the table.

BIRCH WHIPPING

I understand in recent weeks you have changed the rules,

so that a person may now be birched wearing his trousers.

Previously it had to be on the naked buttocks.

Yes, that's quite correct. The rules by the governor have been changed recently to that effect.

But all the people actually birched on the Isle of Man in history

-were all birched on the naked buttocks?

-That's quite true.

BIRCH WHIPPING

Nonetheless, the European Court Of Human Rights ruled that birching was degrading.

There were no more birchings on the Isle of Man after 1976.

Meanwhile, in mainland Britain, the attack on school corporal punishment continued.

Anti-caning pressure group STOPP has led the campaign to banish all forms

of physical punishment from the classroom.

Its secretary is Tom Scott, and he's with us now

in our Central London studio...

Tom Scott was one of a minority of schoolteachers who came out against corporal punishment.

I think we started with a moral objection to it.

We felt it was a barbaric form of punishment.

There is some evidence to suggest that discipline in the classroom has got much worse.

-Is there not, do you think, a case for us to retain it in some circumstances?

-No!

STOPP was founded in 1968 and to begin with, it struggled to find support.

The teaching unions fought tooth and nail against abolition of corporal punishment

and the whole atmosphere would be one of...

"You're a crank if you don't believe in hitting children.

"You're a do-gooder."

And it was very difficult to sort of find any common ground.

By the late '70s, some of the unions were changing their line,

but some continued to fight to keep corporal punishment.

Belting works with your youngster,

what I would call your reasonably well-behaved youngster,

who perhaps has stepped out of line on a few issues

and needs to be brought up sharp.

It's effective with these youngsters.

The whole language was kind of, you know, "Corporal punishment

"is administered as a last resort, in a reasonable and moderate way."

And then you'd find that this was absolute nonsense.

And I felt we had to make this evident to everyone.

A SIX-year-old who had his trousers pulled down by his teacher,

in front of the rest of the class.

He... She didn't even use the belt on him,

she took his own sand shoe and walloped his backside

with his sand shoe.

Now, the Director Of Education said...

The father complained and the Director Of Education said,

"The integrity of that teacher cannot be questioned."

WHISTLE BLOWS

From the beginnings of compulsory education, the cane -

in Scotland, the belt or tawse - had become tied up with a teacher's professional identity,

protection against disorder in the classroom.

# We don't need

# No education... #

There is this permanent fear,

I experienced it myself as a young teacher,

of perhaps losing control over a class.

This was the most dreadful thing that could happen to a teacher,

the idea of a class moving out of control.

# We don't need no thought control... #

It's difficult to explain to anybody that's not been a teacher just how uncomfortable this is.

The knowledge that this group of children is out of control and that other teachers may hear

and that people will see that you are... That you're failing.

# Teachers, leave those kids alone... #

It would almost be like you were in the trenches

and teachers would sometimes say "Right, once more unto the breach!"

And they would think of it as being that sort of battle,

a battle where they'd have to survive.

# Hey! Teachers!

# Leave them kids alone! #

The cane, rather like a field marshall's baton, in some kind of way, symbolised authority.

Caning depended partly on the compliance of pupils themselves in submitting to it.

Many were actually in favour of its use.

I think they should use the cane for people

who have been warned before,

they've have had other punishments, detention or suspension or lines,

and it just didn't have any effect on them.

When I went into teaching myself, certainly, there was no thought of corporal punishment on my part.

But there was a 15-year-old boy

that I was teaching in my first year of teaching,

and having a lot of trouble with.

He was disruptive,

noisy, difficult to teach.

I said, "Why are you like this? Why are you behaving so badly?

Why are you making the class so difficult for everybody else?"

And he said, "You should hit us, you ought to hit me."

And I was absolutely stunned.

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "If you don't hit us, you're not going to get anywhere."

And he made it very clear to me that I looked weak

and that if I didn't do something to rectify the situation, I was never going to get his respect.

Most children want discipline, want authority, want structures.

I'd hate to be suspended. My mum would kill me.

You know, everybody would know you'd been suspended

because you weren't in school, but if you had the cane,

it's so quick and sharp that it's over in a few seconds,

it wouldn't make an imprint on my memory.

You have to treat violence with violence in some cases.

You have to deal with bullying, and the only way to stop it is through caning,

and if then it doesn't stop, I don't think anything else

would really act as a deterrent other than caning.

Many pupils, parents and teachers may have defended the cane,

but increasingly, the media was airing the views of the abolitionists.

Why were you called Killer?

Well, I was the gentlest of men.

Actually, I never laid a hand on a pupil unless I stumbled in the aisle.

Do you think schoolmasters, most of them, believe in corporal punishment?

When asked to vote, they vote to retain the tawse and the cane, why?

Because when you are thrashing a child, you don't have to be teaching him.

Ha, ha! There you are! You see, you know the ropes too well!

Do you have any right to morally dictate to the child its course of conduct?

Do you have any right to teach it religion?

Do you have to keep on dinning into its head Christian ethics

when you don't subscribe to them yourself?

Of course we have the right to do this.

After all, we are faced with a formless mass of more or less social nuisances.

I mean, you are giving to the child the dignity, intelligence and genius that the child does not have!

Anti-corporal punishment campaigners STOPP were even given their own programme.

Four out of five British schools still use corporal punishment.

In many schools, it is an everyday event.

In most parts of Britain, teachers can cane infants, girls and boys of all ages up to 18,

and even the mentally and physically handicapped...

The Open Door film was one of the first things I got involved in.

It was quite a good opportunity, because the whole idea

of the Open Door was to give editorial control to campaigns.

It was a way of publicising one's cause.

Is THIS professional, Mr Jarvis?

Or this?

One argument highlighted in the Open Door film

was the possible sexual element in corporal punishment.

It's common... Common knowledge

that there can be a sexual element, and...

one sees the spate of pornographic magazines you can buy in Soho,

they make this quite explicit.

And the fact that you can make a lot of money selling these magazines,

and a lot of them are to do with beating in a school context.

If you look at these magazines, all these bare buttocks,

and of people generally enjoying themselves, SUPPOSED to be.

Now, all we are saying here is that there is a sadomasochistic element

running throughout society

and if you want to develop that sadomasochistic element,

the best way of doing it is by beating children.

Which was one that the...

The adherents of beating hated it whenever we made that argument.

The idea that punishing children

could affect their sexual instincts was nothing new.

Particularly influential were the ideas of a 19th-century psychiatrist working in Austria,

who had written a best-selling book about sexual behaviour.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing was an Austrian psychiatrist

and in the 1880s,

he started to write a book called Psychopathia Sexualis,

because he had become interested in the subject

of what were then known as "sexual perversions".

There are obviously reasons why people are beginning

to start theorising why people have these sexual interests

which don't seem to have anything to do with marriage and reproduction

and kind of normal heterosexuality.

And he creates the term "sadism" based on the name of the Marquis de Sade,

whose writings were, of course, well-known by that time.

And "masochism", which is based on the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,

who had written the famous Venus In Furs,

which is a novel about a man

who becomes a sex slave of a woman in furs with a whip.

# Shiny, shiny

# Shiny boots of leather

# Whiplash girl-child in the dark... #

Sadomasochistic practices existed well, well before the invention of the term.

So, you know, you get pornography, for example,

of the 18th century in England is very, very sadomasochistic.

Krafft-Ebing collected not only tales of sadomasochistic fantasies, but also images.

This is... You've got a man who's on all fours.

I guess it's what they would call "pony play", where he's being a horse for her.

There is a long, long history of the idea that some people get off on flagellation.

One of the Restoration comedies, there's a character who goes to a prostitute

who is essentially a dominatrix to get his kind of erotic flogging,

and she kind of says, "Well, how did you get to have this rather peculiar taste?"

And he says, "Oh, I learnt it at Westminster School."

So that connection between corporal punishment in the school context

and the later kind of fetish was established, clearly, quite early on.

But the theories of the late-19th century added another dimension to all this

and were quickly taken up

by the early campaigners against corporal punishment.

There's this argument that you were getting pleasure

from cruelty, but of course, you may not be aware of it consciously.

This makes people very, very uneasy, because there is the notion also

that sexuality is not something necessarily innate.

That sexuality can change, it can be confused, it can be perverted by outside forces,

and corporal punishment is one of the ways that you can actually pervert a child's sexuality.

Ideas about the effect of corporal punishment on psychological make-up

may have been part of some of the earliest abolitionists' campaigns,

but it took until the late-20th century for such ideas to really take hold.

One very important reason why corporal punishment went out

of fashion was the link that's increasingly being made

between physical pain and psychological pain.

And increasingly, those two things are tied together.

So in other words, the infliction of physical pain

is not only bad in and of itself, but it is also bad because it creates psychological pain.

And that notion of the psychological self, the inner self,

that can be harmed by these external things impacting, happening to it,

is a very, very modern phenomenon.

By the late '70s, there were well-publicised cases of children

refusing punishment, often with intimations of psychological harm.

I've been away from school for four weeks nearly, nearly four weeks.

I was meant to go to a detention,

but I kept on avoiding it because I knew that I'd already done it.

But they wouldn't have that, so they was going to give me the cane.

So I told them "no". Because every time I do have it, I get ill,

and I end up taking tablets and that.

The pills I'm taking are Valium to calm me down because of my nerves.

I kept getting nerve rashes, then I'm hardly eating at all.

I've lost two stone since June.

I always know when Susan's been caned,

when she comes home from school,

because she's in a very distressed condition.

A medical view of pain had come to dominate,

something to be cured and alleviated.

The notion that a little pain might help form the character seemed outdated.

Once the underpinning of corporal punishment,

with the idea that it does good to the person who suffers,

passes away, it is very hard

to find a clear rationale for beating children in schools.

It begins to look simply like sadistry when one person beats another.

Corporal punishment would find finally be brought

to an end in British state schools by a case that emerged in Scotland.

In Edinburgh a few years ago, they tried to keep a record

of how many times the strap was used in a term.

They got to 10,000, and after that, they stopped counting.

With the staggering frequency of beating in Scottish schools, unjust excesses inevitably occur.

Mass beltings of whole classrooms, a seven-year-old strapped for opening a door for a teacher,

something only monitors were supposed to do.

When two boys refused to be beaten and were suspended from school,

their parents took their case to the European Court Of Human Rights.

The judges at Strasbourg ruled that to allow any form

of physical punishment against the wishes of the parents

was a violation of human rights.

But the result wasn't an immediate ban on corporal punishment in Britain.

The Government's decided corporal punishment

should continue in English and Welsh schools,

but new laws will be passed to enable parents

to insist that their children aren't beaten.

But the Government's opponents say the new laws will create confusion and injustice in the classroom.

There was indeed confusion.

So much so that in 1986, a bill to completely abolish corporal punishment

went to the House Of Commons.

The Government doesn't really know what to do about it.

This is a Conservative government of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher is prime minister.

In the past, she has declared herself in favour of judicial flogging,

she's in favour of hanging,

she's not going to lead a government

that's going to abolish corporal punishment in schools

if she can help it.

It was a free vote and it could not have been closer.

230 MPs voted to retain corporal punishment in state schools,

the number voting for a ban was 231.

The change in the law was partly thanks to the Royal Family.

More or less everything is now set for the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

A short time ago, Miss Ferguson...

There was a Royal wedding taking place the next day

between Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, and a number of MPs,

I believe about a dozen MPs, were actually held up because of the crowds queuing to get a good place,

and about 12 Tories claimed that they were held up by the crowds and they couldn't get there.

And also, even Mrs Thatcher wasn't able to vote against abolition,

because she was entertaining Ronald Reagan's wife.

Corporal punishment was only outlawed in independent schools in 1999.

And today, the debate goes on over smacking in the home.

The only arena in Britain in which corporal punishment survives.

Over the past 200 years, there have been many arguments

in favour of corporal punishment, but in Britain, these ideas have slowly been pushed aside.

Certainly, the side that says you should not hit have won the day, there's no question about that.

They have definitely won.

The fate of a 2005 legal challenge by religious schools confirmed the prevailing attitude.

The schools argued corporal punishment was an expression of religious belief,

but the House Of Lords ruled that the right to hold the belief

does not confer the right to act on that belief.

Legislators have reacted to the views of psychologists and campaigners

and responded to the changing notions of childhood, crime and human rights.

But have WE really changed?

I think we are a more squeamish, understanding, watchful, better-informed society

and we don't have alibis like religion, for example,

to justify the violence upon other people's bodies.

But we're still the old Adam.

We're still the basic primaly curious, violent people, I think, that our ancestors were.

For many people in Britain and throughout the world,

the arguments that once justified corporal punishment are still valid.

So could it return?

It would be quite impossible for corporal punishment and school beatings to come back,

partly because of the European Convention Of Human Rights,

which is now enshrined in British, or English, Welsh and Scottish law.

I can not imagine a return to corporal punishment

in our society, because it has been increasingly de-legitimised.

Now, that said, I have to say, I was sort of hesitant because,

of course, I think most people would have said that about torture.

Most of us would have said, not that long ago, a few years ago, that it was impossible to consider

that torture would come back in the Western world.

So as an historian, I think we never want to say never.

Human Rights laws may make this behaviour effectively unlawful today,

but laws change, there may be more to come in the history of corporal punishment.

To challenge your views and learn more about the justice system,

go to...

And follow the links to The Open University.

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