Spanking a child: Why it is wrong (from a conservative Christian perspective)

 Most parents in this country spank and/or punish their children, in some way, in some form. Many people misunderstand this issue, including even those who advocate against it. American anti-spanking advocates are often motivated by unlawful child abuse, meaning usually sexual abuse. Most every child advocate in America was sexually abused at some point. I myself experienced a single "lawful" incident of the "watch" variety (an unlawful form of starting up a criminal investigation, against God's eyes). I find lawful abuse, personally, more abusive, though this sort of abuse is highly traumatic in its own way - silent memories (I suspect many people out there have silent memories of sexual abuse). Sexual trauma is not always something that you hold onto for the rest of your life. We frame it that way so that at-risk adults don't abuse children sexually, rationalizing that it is okay. I have been thinking about this for some time, but don't see myself as the main victim - the children "depicted" there were, and most surely are.

Many of us cite to parents the about 50 years of research posited by a team of researchers at the University of New Hampshire Family Laboratory, but then parents laugh at the research. Laugh at my pain (which the research thoroughly and immaculately describes). Laugh at my childhood suffering, all excused by a non-existence "legal defense" known as "reasonable chastisement". Just a piece of paper. Punishing or controlling a child in any way was always wrong, even where it wasn't, because it constituted the moral crime of entitlement leading to theft by way of kidnapping. Spanking a child is kidnapping.

Kidnapping was a form of grand theft, meaning a direct on one's person, property, or effects, including an attack on a child through physical battery. Entitlement is not just wanting things from a child, but wanting to the point of seeking to impose said item on a child, leading to theft/abuse. Kidnapping, among other things, is directly imposing physical force on a child for any reason. Under Jewish law, purity standards called for persons to not have physical contact of any kind without given consent, and this was strictly enforced by societal conditioning. Fathers were not allowed to even touch their minor children, ever so slightly, without their mother's permission. Children, until a late age, remained very close to their mother - until age 6 with boys, and until age 12 with girls.

Kidnapping, as an offense, is repeated in the New Testament in Colossians 3:21 KJV:

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they become discouraged.

The Greek root word translated "provoke...to anger" is ερεθιζο (Latin: erethizo) and refers to short-term damages to the child, such as pain (ex. from a needlepin), shame (ex. verbal abuse, defamation of character), fornication, stemming from mankind's entitled nature...(stopped - Matthew's menace gaslighting)