Plymouth father is arrested for using belt on son, 12

Patriot Ledger ^ | April 30, 2005 | TAMARA RACE

[holymoly]

PLYMOUTH - A father who used a belt to spank his 12-year-old son over forgotten homework is facing a felony assault charge and an investigation by the state Department of Social Services.

Charles S. Enloe, 42, of 4 Cortelli Court, Plymouth, hit his son on the buttocks three times with a belt after the boy forgot his homework assignment at school, police said.

He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

Enloe said he was surprised at his arrest, but that he doesn't blame police for doing their job.

‘‘I never knew it would be considered assault with a deadly weapon,'' Enloe said. ‘‘And it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be a crime if it's discipline. I know there are parents out there that abuse their children, but I'm definitely not one of them. But police have to follow the letter of the law. My father was a police officer. I'm not angry at them, and I don't blame my son.''

Enloe said he hopes the courts will dismiss the charge after reviewing the facts. ‘‘I have no previous record,'' he said.

He said his son is still living with him despite the incident. He and the boy's mother are divorced, according to the police.

The mother obtained a restraining order against Enloe on her son's behalf, but the order was temporary and has expired, he said.

‘‘The incident got blown out of proportion,'' Enloe said.

Police Capt. Michael Botieri said officers have more leeway about arresting a parent for domestic violence when an open hand is used for spanking.

‘‘When a parent uses an instrument to discipline, it makes it more difficult for us,'' Botieri said. ‘‘The belt pushed this over the edge.''

The incident happened at about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, and left no marks or bruises, according to police.

The Department of Social Services is investigating the complaint after its Cape Cod area office received a report of suspected abuse on Friday. DSS spokeswoman Denise Monteiro said the allegation was made by a person or agency required by law to report any suspected incident of child abuse. She would not identify the person.

Police, teachers, health care workers and clergy are all required to report cases of suspected abuse in Massachusetts.

Monteiro said the case is not considered an emergency and said the DSS has up to 10 days to investigate the report. Monteiro said the department usually interviews family members, the child's pediatrician, school officials, neighbors and others. ‘‘The allegations have to be met with evidence,'' she said.

The boy told police his father hit him with the belt for forgetting his homework, and said he would be hit six times wearing just his underwear if he forgot his homework again, police said.

Fearing the promised punishment, the boy called his mother Wednesday when he forgot his homework a second time, police said.

The boy and his mother, Diana Dematteo of Sandwich, reported the incident to police Wednesday.

Enloe told police he used the belt to ‘‘lightly'' strike the boy three times on the bottom for disciplinary reasons.

His son had improved academically since coming to live with him in March and he ‘‘acted out of love,'' the police report quotes Enloe as saying.

Enloe was arrested and charged at the station.

Enloe pleaded innocent Thursday to the charge and was released on his promise to return to court on June 1.

Monteiro, the DSS spokeswoman, said that under the Massachusetts corporal punishment law, it is not illegal for a guardian to strike a child physically or spank a child so long as the child isn't injured or ‘‘left with a bruise, bumps, cuts and you would also consider the frequency of the punishment.''

In 1997, the Rev. Donald Cobble of Woburn found himself thrust into the national spotlight when his then 9-year-old son, Judah, asked a teacher not to send a note home about his school behavior because he feared that Cobble would spank him with a belt, as he had done before.

The teacher contacted social service workers, who found that this form of discipline posed a ‘‘substantial risk of injury.'' But two years and $62,000 in legal fees later, Cobble's name was removed from the state registry of child abusers after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court exonerated him, saying that Judah suffered only temporary marks as a result of the spanking. The case was closed.

Your Views

How far should a parent be able to go when disciplining a child?

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[Allosaurs_r_us]

Fathers and sons may fight, dads may whup, thump chests and otherwise dominate their charges

 

Unfortunately my father was a long haul trucker and my stepfather traveled in construction until later in life. It was ok though, since I had no problem taking care of the fishing and hunting with several insane friends from the time I was 8. It is a wonder we survived. A wonder my mother stayed out of the loony bin too. LOL

[squarebarb]

This happened to my cousins;

Mom went off to a night class and left Dad alone with five kids, who went bananas playing, fighting, throwing pillows etc. Dad was NOT the disciplinarian in the family.

He said over and over, "If you kids don't quiet down I'm going to take my belt to you!"

Had no effect. Continue food fights, running with scissors, etc.

"All right, that's it, I've had it!" Jerks off his belt --- and his pants fell down around his ankles!

Complete hysteria for hours, a family story told forever.

[freekitty]

This is so ridiculous. Keep the good people down so the lunies can wreck havoc.

[Horatio Gates]

Classic!

[SALChamps03]

What do you expect? These idiots sent Kennedy and Kerry to the Senate.

[January24th]

Yep. But the dad had only recently won custody. He should have been a bit more circumspect considering the boy had apparently been raised by a woman up until then.

[TheForceOfOne]

I remember the old belt, dad wore it like a police badge. I only needed to look at the belt to decide if what I was thinking was worth it.

When I was 10 I stole a candy bar from the local store and got caught, I begged the store owner do let me go, I begged him to let me clean up his lot if he didn't tell. He told my parents, I got the belt, and I cleaned the parking lot too.

Never ever again did I even think about stealing something. Dads belt got rust on it waiting for an opportunity which didn't arise. Now my younger brother saw what happened and wised up, he still laughs at me over it.

[Raycpa]

Is there a staute of limitations? Can I get my 72 year old father arrested?

[Allosaurs_r_us]

Here's a little excerpt from " A Fine and Pleasant Misery". Any one who remembers their camping adventures as a youngster will immediately smell the smoke in this story. LOL

 

The campfire was of two basic kinds: the Smudge and the Inferno.  The Smudge was what you used when you were desperately in need of heat.   By hovering over the Smudge the camper could usually manage to thaw the ice from his hands before being kippered to death.  Even if the Smudge did burst into a decent blaze, there was no such thing as warming up gradually.  One moment the ice on your pants would show slight signs of melting and the next the hair on your legs was going up in smoke.  Many's the time I've seen a blue and shivering man hunched over a crackling at blaze suddenly eject from his boots and pants with a loud yell and go bounding about in the snow, the front half of him the color of boiled lobster, the back half still blue.

    The Inferno was what you always used for cooking.  Experts on camp cooking claimed you were posed to cook over something called "a bed of glowing coals."  But what everyone cooked over was the Inferno.  The "bed of glowing coals" was a fiction concocted by experts on camp cooking.  Nevertheless the camp cook was frequently pictured, by artists who should have known better, as a tranquil man hunkered down by a bed of glowing coals, turning plump trout in the frying pan with the blade of his hunting knife. In reality the camp cook was a wildly distraught individual who charged through waves of heat and speared savagely with a long sharp stick at a burning hunk of meat he had tossed on the grill from a distance of twenty feet.  The rollicking old fireside songs originated in the efforts of other campers to drown out the language of the cook and prevent it from reaching the ears of little children. Meat roasted over a campfire was either raw or extra well done, but the cook usually came out medium rare.

    The smoke from the campfire always blew directly in the eyes of the campers, regardless of wind direction. No one minded much, since it prevented you from seeing what you were eating. If a bite of food showed no signs of struggle, you considered this a reasonable indication that it came from the cook pot and was not something just passing through.

 

I recommend anyone needing a good laugh, read this guy. He is hilariuos. He grew up about 30 miles from where I live and still camp today.

[dalereed]

Mine never used a belt but by the time I was 12 if I was going to get it I had to go cut a limb off the apricot tree and think about it all the way there and back and whether i cut one the right size. If it was too small he made it clear that he would cut the next one that would be more than ample.

[oldbrowser]

The teacher contacted social service workers, who found that this form of discipline posed a ‘‘substantial risk of injury.''

Have you ever seen the naive kids they have as social service workers ? Most of them are fresh out of school, have no children and have no experience or judgement. I believe that these people do more harm than good and should only act in the most extreme of cases.

[MississippiMan]

THIS is the reason that kids no longer have any sense of right and wrong. When the unholy police state can arrest a parent for spanking one of their own children with a belt, and charge him with assault with a deadly weapon, you know that society is very near to collapse.

You're exactly right. Discipline has already been abandoned by a huge percentage of parents because they're too weak themselves to absorb the pain of heart and soul that comes with disciplining a child you love. Now it's been taken a step further and outlawed. A society in which there is no way to teach the principle of CONSEQUENCE to its children is a society with a bleak outlook for the future.

MM

[whereasandsoforth]

I like your way of thinking and I understand the differences in our approach to this subject. I get so very frustrated with the lack of common sense in society, especially liberal society, that sometimes I want to go live in the woods. Arresting this man for using a belt on his son is not doing anything to alleviate that desire.

[april15Bendovr]

http://www.fongnet.net/stories/singmyths.htm

Myth 2: Caning is inhumane and that poor Michael Fay boy got undeserved punishment for his little bitty crime of vandalism.


Dead wrong.  First of all, as an American and proud of it, Michael Fay deserved to be caned for what he did.  If his father took a yardstick to his sorry *ss at a younger age, maybe he would have acted better as a teenager.  In any case, you deserve to hear the whole story behind what happened to Michael Fay, and draw your own conclusion.

Fay was convicted of vandalism along with another boy, son of some Hong Kong bigwig or something like that.  They had taken spray paint and painted some cars.  He was sentenced to jail and three strokes of the cane, which is basically a really painful spanking.  Is that too much for simple vandalism?

What Americans don't really understand is that a car in Singapore will cost you at least $60,000 US dollars.  And that's for a little tiny subcompact car that you wouldn't want to be seen in.  A mid-sized car that costs $15,000 in the US will run you $100,000 in Singapore.  Vandalizing a car is the equivalent of breaking into someone's home and damaging that.  People in Singapore work years to buy or pay off their cars and any malicious damage to a car shows extraordinary lack of respect for that.

Also consider that Fay, mostly due to the whining of his father to the US government, got off easy.  He got only one stroke of the cane and served no jail time.  His "friend" from Hong Kong, however, was not so fortunate.  He got the full sentence.  How's that for American justice?  Ironically, Fay has been in trouble with the law back in the US more than once since his Singapore incident.  Maybe some time served in jail would have done him some good.

Finally, where do people get off saying that caning is a violation of human rights?  America is so quick to pass judgment on the human rights conditions of other countries that it forgets to look it's own violations.  The death penalty is still enforced in the majority of the States.  Enough said.

[cinives]

My mother was given a 24" wooden paddle at her junior year sorority dance (she was not returning to college her final year because she was marrying my dad). That paddle was prominently displayed on the wall of their bedroom for many years, until it was no longer needed. She's ask "Is it necessary for me to get the paddle ?" and you'd rethink your actions really fast.

When my sister and I were teenagers, my sister backtalked my mother at the dinner table one night. My mother said not a word, got up, walked over to the kitchen sink and picked up the bar of lava soap that was always there, and without warning jammed it into my sister's mouth. The look on my sister's face was priceless LOL. You never heard her backtalk my mother ever again.

OTOH, my father was more laid back but really into psychological warfare - he could get you feeling so sorry and ashamed of your actions that he didn't need to raise his hand.

Hadn't thought about all this in years...it worked really well..

[freedumb2003]

If only Old Joseph Kennedy had use the old belt on Teddy's behind a few times....Maybe Teddy would of turned out better.

I think it is ther opposite -- old Joe was a tyrant and was unmerciful when his kids did less than the results he wanted, AT ANY COST. That is why the brood ended up being such snakes in the grass.

[vetvetdoug]

The worse I ever got it was with a 2X4. My MOTHER caught me after I had ridden my bicycle to Mexico and got drunk. I was eleven years old. I made the error of putting my hands over my butt and took some real hard licks to my hands. A belt was not enough and the 2X4 was a memory maker. I had the fear of God in me from then on.

[Jonx6]

Four Yorkshire Men Skit in wav format near the bottom, it also has Wizzo, Enjoy!

[76834]

Danged if that story doesnt bring back memories.

Was raised up in the 50's and it was a totally different world back then.

When I was 9 I stole some fireworks from a nearby store. When I got home mom found them and wanted to know where I got them. I told her the truth, getting caught lying was unthinkable.
She grabbed me by the ear and marched me to the store with the fireworks and made me apologize to the store owner.
Later that evening when dad got home he set my ass on fire.

Last time I ever stole anything....

[JoeV1]

When I was growing up in the 1950's the house rule (one of them) was that us kids were NEVER to say no when Mom asked us to do something. If we ever did then she would utter the words that froze the blood in our veins, "Wait until your father gets home". On more then one occasion I was whacked across the back of my legs by dad's belt. In time we all came to realize that just doing what mom wants is a lot easier then the agony of waiting for a whipping. Sometimes the waiting was worse then the wacks.

Had I even THOUGHT about calling the authorities I can promise you I would not be sitting in front of this computer typing this message.

Anyone who believes physical punishment, within limits, is not effective as a deterrent need only look at what is going on in our society today among the young.