I see corporal punishment, applied for real offenses, balanced with an otherwise gentle demeanor and a general loving attitude, as generally beneficial and not at child abuse at all.
I may well be 100% wrong on the Sanchez case itself, but I cannot see the general condemnation of corporal punishment.
It’s very hard to tell the difference.
Corporal punishment was outlawed in California schools after a number of cases of outright beatings of children by school officials that resulted in hospitalizations.(I’ve seen the photos). What one considers corporal punishment, another sees as child abuse. Where do we draw the line?
If you saw someone beating a dog on the street or in a yard would you call the cops? How about a woman? I would w/o hesitating, even though I didn’t know the extenuating circumstances or back story.
I remember an old DA with 30 years of experience dealing with child abusers telling me the ONLY thing that stops abusers is JAIL. Counseling, anger management programs, 10-step programs, whatever-the-hell it is — not one of them work, not one. Most of them grew up abused as well.
All we can do is prevention, tell young girls the red flags of abusers, have abusers tell their stories (of course, teens think we’re wrong and don’t know what we’re talking about — until THEY come back years later as one of the tellers of surviving abuse). And, as I mentioned before, some women allow the new man to beat the living hell out of their children because they’re afraid of being alone or don’t want to lose the man.
One young women I worked with two years ago was found this past January along the side of the freeway — murdered and thrown out of a moving car like a piece of trash. She thought she’d escaped her abuser... She left behind a three year old and a baby.