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Oct. 13, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:27
1481 The Case Against Spanking

A Freedomain Radio interview with Jordan Riak, Executive Director, Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education - http://www.nospank.net

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Well, thank you very much for taking the time to have a chat with me.
I think that your website, it's nosbank.net.
That's right..net, right.
It's a wonderful, wonderful resource.
And I run a free domain radio.
It's a philosophy show very much dedicated to I think that's hard to escape in the world is that if you want to look for the roots of violence, not the only place, but the very first place that I think is wise to look is in people's childhood experiences with and exposure to violence.
And so I thought that your site was wonderful and very interesting.
And I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about, you know, based on when you wrote your articles, you've been in the field for quite some time.
Tell me a little bit about your involvement and how you came to do what you're doing.
Alright, I'll try.
I'll give you a little background.
I've been working on this issue for about 30 years.
I began when in the middle 70s, I moved with my family to Sydney, Australia.
We moved from New Jersey in the United States to Sydney.
New Jersey was the first state in the U.S. To abolish corporal punishment in schools.
They did that when Abraham Lincoln was president.
I thought the whole world behaved that way.
The phrase corporal punishment conjured in my mind pictures of Charles Dickens of that era.
But when we arrived in Sydney, it was a rude awakening.
My three sons went to schools that used corporal punishment.
That's when I began working on the issue.
And then when we returned some years later to the United States, I carried on the campaign here in California.
It took about roughly two years to get Caning stopped in California.
New South Wales, but they didn't pass a law until, I think it was about eight years later.
And this is typical.
The practice will, as those who do it and those who defend the action become embarrassed by their own behavior, it tapers off.
It tends to disappear, and the lawmakers seem incapable of Developing enough courage and backbone to codify it into law until after the majority of the public accepts not to use corporal punishment in schools.
That's routine.
The same thing happened in California.
Here in California, I drafted legislation For Assemblyman Sam Farr that banned paddling in California schools, that took about two years of lobbying and debating until that law was passed.
Now we've got a situation where the Deep South, 20 states, still cling to the paddle and we're having quite a debate to get them to stop, quite a discussion.
Sorry to interrupt, but some of the research that I've looked into seems to suggest that in the South, and particularly among more fundamentalist families, there is somewhat more resistance to non-violent or non-aggressive ways of dealing with children.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
I have two maps on the website, one of the top ten paddling states, and right alongside it is a map of the top ten lynching states.
Now, when I use the word lynching and I talk to an audience, say, of people that are high school age, I have to define the word.
They don't know what it means. I'm old enough to remember.
I know what the word lynch means.
The two maps are almost identical.
Seven states show up in both maps.
The top ten paddling states and the top ten lynching states are nearly a perfect match.
And that's no accident.
No, and I think it probably is also no accident that from the states where there is the greatest amount of violence used against children, you also get the greatest military enrollment, which is not to say that all military is bad, but I think there may be some relationship that way as well.
Well, the violence against kids in school encourages them to drop out, and when they drop out, they're unprepared for employment except for joining the military.
Now, interestingly, the military can't use corporal punishment because we have a volunteer service in the United States.
You'd get no one to volunteer if corporal punishment was being used on recruits.
The prison system can't flog prisoners anymore.
Husbands can't beat their wives anymore.
The only beatable person left is the child.
I see that as a blatant violation of the constitutional guarantee for equal protection.
We have equal protection and we have protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
And there's just one big exception and that's for children.
They don't qualify for constitutional protection.
And if we accept that the law should work its hardest or social justice or morals should work the hardest to defend the most vulnerable, we've got it almost completely backwards, right?
I mean, if there's one group that you really want to protect from violence, it would be children because it is out of that violence, you could argue, that almost all social violence comes.
Yes, you said it perfectly.
If you examine violent behavior in adulthood, it always is preceded by violent experience in childhood.
I don't think you can find a perpetrator of violence, an adult perpetrator, who didn't get his or her first lessons in violence At home, and beginning at an age earlier than most people would want to admit.
The spanking, and that's a euphemism for assault and battery, that begins earlier than anyone wants to admit.
And those children, they get their first lesson, and that lesson sets them up for subsequent violence, and eventually they become perpetrators, many of them.
And if they don't abuse others, they abuse themselves with drugs and chemicals and ways to relieve the pain of having been a victim.
I think you're entirely right, which is a ridiculous thing for me to say because you're the expert and I'm just a radio host, but I certainly agree with that.
Well, I'm not an expert. I'm really an amateur.
Credential in the field, but a lot of folks with credentials quote what I say.
They like it. I don't think that this doesn't require deep thinking.
Look, the argument in defense of corporal punishment of children, that argument was used not long ago in defense of husbands' right to batter their wives, but they had nice language for it.
They said a good Christian husband has the right to chastise a wife who doesn't honor and respect.
If you put it in the right language, it sounds okay.
Today, there's no defense for a husband or a wife battering a husband.
Spousal violence is not okay.
You're exactly right.
One of the things that – the power disparity in terms of economics and physical size and strength meant that most people felt that it was more egregious for a husband to batter a wife because of the economic disparities, strength and legal disparities.
And yet, of course, there's almost no – well, there's no wife who's as small relative to her husband as a child is relative to an adult.
So that power disparity – I mean a wife can conceivably run away, find a shelter, but children really don't have that option.
So that the power, the economic disparity, the size, the strength, the power means that what may seem like spanking to an adult feels – I mean if someone that was five times my size or ten times my size were to hit me, there's no way that I could ever perceive that as anything other than terrifying no matter what euphemisms were applied.
Not seeing it from the child's perspective I think is one of the fundamental problems.
Yes, exactly. You said it perfectly.
And there's another element here that we've got to consider, and this applies specifically to schools that paddle and to many parents who spank.
The target for the assault is the child's pelvic area, specifically targeting the anus.
Now, if you say that's what – no one admits that that's what they do.
You tell a child to bend over and I'm going to hit your bottom with a wooden board and the target of that blow is going to be your anus, the perpetrator is clearly – that's a sexual battery.
The perpetrator is arrested within minutes and will do jail time.
But if you couch it in the right language, whoa, I just gave him a little pop on the bottom, or a spanking, or a weapon.
And it's comical language.
If you sit down and you make a list of all the euphemisms for battering a child, the list doesn't finish.
And they are all comical words.
In fact, if you do a Google search on spanking, aside from the hits that you'll get, Wrong choice.
The connections that you'll get to the act of punishing children or to pornography, you get a lot of hits involving sports.
They'll talk about one team spanking another, and it's all tongue in cheek.
It's all comedy.
However, look at it from the perspective of a child, and as you pointed out, someone who's a fraction of the size of the perpetrator, it's not funny at all.
No, and clearly people – well, people often say that children don't have the cognitive abilities to reason, which I think is being progressively disproven by the work of child psychologists who are proving that children develop empathy as early as 14 to 16 months.
And yet when I make the argument when people say that, well, children don't have the cognitive capacity and so we have to use the euphemism and anything that people use a euphemism for, they should stop, right?
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
But they say, well, the children don't have the cognitive capacity.
But by that reasoning, elderly people who suffer from Alzheimer's or dementia, if they forget something or if they leave something behind or if they don't remember an instruction, we should be able to hit them as well.
But that's called elder abuse.
Exactly. You don't hit your grandmother because she wet the bed or she forgot something.
We understand that.
So we accept that a lack of cognitive ability is not reason to use violence in every segment except children.
There's no school where somebody who was developmentally handicapped would be beaten because of a cognitive deficiency.
But again, we accept it in a weird way.
We accept it with children, which is completely – it's crazy when you see it and it's hard to see, if that makes any sense.
Yes, yes. Well, you know, I think that the lessons of violence are learned immediately after birth, as are the lessons of gentleness and peace.
Newborn infants, I don't know the exact earliest moment At which a newborn infant can be seen to smile, but it's very early, very early, soon after birth, an infant will smile.
Six weeks, I think, is about when it happens, is when you get the first genuine smile that's not just gas.
I say this because I'm a pretty new dad, so that was our big exciting moment.
Okay, alright, so based on your experience, and you know that the infant's first experience of the touch of the mother, the taste of her milk, the scent of her body, the sound of her voice, Those stimuli are the things that set the pattern for all that follows.
And if the infant is exposed to shouting and screaming and insults and neglect, and then pretty soon, very soon, sooner than anybody wants to admit, slaps and smacks and whatever you want to call them, That infant is being damaged and will be going down the wrong path.
Very hard to correct that early mistreatment.
It sets the stage for all that follows.
Pretty soon, the baby learns that the only way to be safe from being a victim is to become a victimizer.
Then you've got young children who become bullies.
They mistreat the family pets or their younger siblings.
And then when they get to school, we have a whole class of bullying.
I mean, it's a major problem in American education.
But when you look at any individual bully and say, where did you get your first lessons in bullying?
We'd be shocked to learn that they got those lessons Very early in life.
And they're hard to unlearn.
They're very hard to undo that damage, that early damage.
And then teachers who paddle, they perpetuate it.
And now, as paddling is falling out of favor, the teachers who paddle are finding that their best opportunities are to work with children who have disabilities, who can't speak.
And now we're finding There's egregious sadism and cruelty being done to children who are autistic or have other disabilities because they aren't good witnesses in their own defense.
And people who have an impulse to inflict pain say this.
They'll find victims who are defenseless.
And what could be a more defenseless victim than a child who can't speak or who isn't credible when they accuse someone?
When you work in these environments where I think you said there were 20 states, do you have any idea of the prevalence of corporal punishment?
Because sometimes when I've looked at some of these statistics, it really is quite shocking, the prevalence of corporal punishment.
In the states which still allow it, do you have any idea of the prevalence of parents who will say, yes, I use corporal punishment on my children?
I don't.
I really don't know.
And this is anecdotal.
I can't prove it.
I have no science to prove it.
But a teacher, an educator who wants to corporally punish a child, will be very leery, will be very restrained, will not inflict a punishment on a child if that teacher knows that the parents are educated, affluent, Have resources, can have an attorney in their address book.
The teacher will target the child who is a welfare recipient, whose parent is a single parent on welfare, uneducated.
And the teacher knows that that child will go home with having been paddled and the parent is going to feel that he or she, usually a she, is doing her duty to give the child a second paddling at home.
Right. I hadn't thought of that, that there is a certain kind of class issue there where the violence may be concentrated more against those who have fewer resources in education to combat it.
Yes, yes. Well, bullies don't pick people who can fight back.
Bullies pick easy victims.
Yeah, as in the US and Iraq, right?
Exactly, exactly. You got it.
And I don't know if you've been up on the latest stuff that's coming out around, I think I saw this on your website, so I'm sure that you are, but some of the studies that have been coming out more recently are showing that there is an IQ point cost even to Mild spanking over the long haul and behavioral problems.
Absolutely, yes. I see it anecdotally.
When I'm invited to talk to a high school class, about two weeks ago, I did a presentation to a high school class and the teacher warned me in advance.
She said, oh, you're going to get some resistance here.
And there are some kids who really believe in spanking, and they aren't even parents yet, but they almost are itching to become a parent so they can spank their kids.
And my impression, and I saw those, I detected those in the class right away.
It seems that the dumbest kids are the ones that are the most eager to hit.
But as I say, that's not scientific research.
That's just an impression that I got based on anecdotal evidence.
Right. And people may say, well, people who aren't as intelligent will have fewer verbal or negotiating resources to deal with children.
But, of course, the science seems to be indicating, and again, I'm not an expert in the field either, but the science seems to be indicating that the lack of intelligence that leads to proclivity for spanking itself is partially a result of having been Now, there's an interesting outcome of this research.
You're talking about the University of New Hampshire publication, the work of Murray Strauss and his colleagues.
In the past day or two, in fact, I saw it this morning for the first time, the American Academy of Pediatricians, not to be confused with the American The American College of Pediatricians, not to be confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics, has just come out with a paper criticizing the Strauss research.
What they're doing is nitpicking it, looking for flaws in the research.
By the way, the American College of Pediatricians is an offshoot of the American Academy of Pediatrics and it was created in order to promote Arch-conservative principles, one of which is the defense of corporal punishment.
The same handful of people, the names associated with that group, they appear in this latest rebuttal to Strauss, predictably.
And you can be sure, if you turn the clock back, and I've tried this, I did a Google search on rationalizations for racial segregation.
If you turn the clock back 30, 40 years, you can find some people with PhD after their names explaining why Jim Crow laws are not all that bad really and finding excuses where it could be supported by pseudoscience.
Oh, sure. And the first husband who was convicted of assault and battery against his wife I'm sure that his defense was similarly based.
You can find, as I pointed out before, you change the language.
Don't call it battering or beating.
Call it chastisement.
It's a nice biblical term.
And the wife's duty to honor and obey, you know, put those two words together.
It gives you a nice antiseptic approach to the issue.
And use the right language and pick the right anecdotes.
You can defend wife beating.
You can defend racial segregation.
And going back earlier, there was the physical punishment of apprentices.
and before that, the whipping of slaves in the cotton field.
Well, and I think interestingly enough, the same arguments I think as you're pointing out tend to be kind of cyclical, right?
So because slaves were not educated or they were forcibly not educated, they ended up not with – they didn't have the cognitive or economic or reading or writing or language skills that would allow them to succeed even in a moderately agrarian economy and Some people say, well, they're not smart enough to be free.
That's why they have to be slaves.
But of course, it's reversing the cause and effect.
They're not educated because they're slaves.
They're not slaves because they're not educated.
The same thing I think occurs when parents use corporate punishment.
They say, well, my child is so difficult.
I have to use corporate punishment.
But the research seems to be very strongly indicating That your child is difficult because you have used corporal punishment.
And this becomes particularly true in the teenage years when the power, the strength and size disparity begins to close.
Right, exactly. And then, of course, the teenager uses whatever the tools that he's learned.
And the tools are to respond aggressively or to respond with aggression toward oneself by taking drugs and drinking, smoking, etc.
And that relieves the stress and the pain of feeling rejected and feeling helpless.
One can soothe oneself with drug taking and you can see that You know, when I park my car, when I go shopping and I park my car, there's one section where the smokers have to...
They're outside in that one area where they can't smoke in the building, so they're outside smoking.
Now, I remember as a high school student, there was a smoking room in our school.
It was a room that doubled as a storage room for the janitorial supplies.
And if you were a senior...
If you were a member of the smoking club, you could go there and you could feel good.
I mean, you could light up a cigarette among your peers and feel like you're John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, a real man, and smoke.
From today's perspective, we can see how dangerous and how wrongheaded that is, but at that time, The teenager felt liberated.
Don't spank me.
I'm John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette dangling from my mouth.
I think it's also interesting and tragic, of course, is the amount of time that it takes for this to change.
You could look back and say that it was in the 19th century that the rights of children first began to be examined.
and some empathy for children, even in the writings of Charles Dickens.
But, and of course, Freud, when he began to talk about, or he began to really look into the causes of neurosis and pathology in some of his patients and found sexual exploitation and rape, child rape, often at the root of it.
And he took that step and then kind of took it back and went into the Oedipal and Electra complex.
And if you look at that, it's been, you could say, you could say it's been 150, 175 years that the rights of children have really been at the forefront.
And certainly, there has been progress.
There has been progress but compared to something like women's rights which have been much more rapid.
Compared to the rights of minorities in the culture, much more rapid.
Elder abuse and cognizance of that, much more rapid.
And I think the real tragedy is, of course, this is the one group that can't speak for themselves.
And that may be part of the reason that it's taking so long.
My theory is, I think there are two reasons.
One we've touched on, and that is that the victim can't speak in their own defense.
And they're totally dependent on the victimizer.
And I think there's another element here, and that is very few parents, very few people who are adults who have ever been in charge of children can look back on their own treatment of children and say, I have a totally clean slate.
I've never engaged in cruel behavior.
Very few can say that.
I'm a parent and I'm a grandparent.
And if I could turn the clock back to some of the mistakes that I made years ago, I would do things differently.
So guilt is a major factor here.
Very few people want to accuse their parents of having been abusers.
They want to look back at their parents and their grandparents.
And long after their parents and grandparents are gone from this life, they want to Envelop that memory, put that memory, dress it up, clean it up, see it from a romantic perspective, make it more pleasant.
They don't want to remember the ugly stuff.
So there's this guilt to admit that spanking is what it really is, assault and battery, It's very unpleasant.
So it's very easy to grasp, to seize on all the rationalizations and justifications for it.
And we all love to remember our past, to see it in a warm light.
It is also something that is interesting as well, that most people, if they were to see, say, a man hitting a woman in a parking lot, they would intervene, whether that would be directly or simply call the cops or whatever.
But the idea of doing that for a child, which is something I've talked about in my show and I've done myself, and it is a scary thing to do, right?
But the idea of doing that for a child, which is much more important.
I mean, we should do it for everyone, but everyone we should do it for, the most important would be for a child.
But it's something that we take a step back from.
We're like, well, it's a family.
I don't want to get involved. That's something that's very different.
I think that also communicates itself directly to children, the degree to which they are in a society that claims to value peaceful negotiation as a means of resolving things.
Yet, that society does not do much, it seems at times, to step in and actually protect the child if the parent is out of control.
Yes. And the inconsistency of this behavior, it's so clear.
In the news just yesterday, the news of a little boy who brought his scout knife.
It's a little tool that's got a knife, a fork, a spoon, and it folds up into like a pocket knife.
He brought it to school with him.
It was his favorite piece of scouting equipment.
And he was suspended.
And he had no idea that what he was doing would bring such a consequence.
And of course, the school was ultimately very embarrassed and they rescinded his suspension and they agreed that he was not bringing a weapon to school.
But in the same state, children are beaten with paddles.
Right. When a teacher brings a weapon to school, why doesn't the same standard apply?
Well, yeah, because the teachers have power.
We have zero tolerance for weapons in classroom except when the teacher brings a weapon.
Right. Yeah, of course, teachers vote and they have a union and...
Exactly. No, that is – I just – by the by, I mean I went to a boarding school when I was younger and I very distinctly remember this as something that I could not figure out at the time but had to make – I had to have it make sense later.
A boy I knew at about the age of seven, he threw a stone at a cat and in consequence, he was caned for his aggression against a cat and the stone didn't even hit the cat.
And that, you know, it just made no sense.
As you say, if we hit animals, it's abuse, right?
If we hit adults, it's assault.
But if we hit children, it's discipline.
It's, you know, it's being an involved parent.
And I just remember that that contradiction, it blew my mind even at the time.
And I still, you know, I think it's becoming more clear now as I get older, but I just remember that very vividly, that he was dragged off crying to be caned for throwing and missing a cat.
Yes, yes. We can learn so much from our memories.
Let me tell you a brief anecdote from my teen years.
I had a summer job working as a carpenter's helper on construction sites during the summertime, my summer break from school.
I remember one of the young men who was an employee there I had recently been married and I remember him during the lunch break boasting about he was so proud of his role as a husband and he described this he said when he gets home every day his wife has to give him a list of all the places she's been and all the people she's spoken to because he wants to be sure that she didn't step out of line And he was so pleased with his power over his wife that she had to report to him like she was on parole.
And he was the parole agent.
And I thought to myself, you know, how can he be proud of that?
But he was.
And of course, his examples of the relationship between a powerful husband and a dependent wife, in his mind, this gave him justification for that kind of behavior.
And the trickle-down theory of humiliation means that it would be fairly easy to guess how her parenting would be relative to those dependent upon her based on how she was treated by her husband, which is part of the cycle that is so tragic.
Exactly. And what this man saw in the treatment of his mother by his father.
Probably a parallel there, too.
And there is some additional research, and I appreciate that.
That's a very, very interesting anecdote.
The last point I'd like to make is there does seem to be some research coming out at the moment.
I haven't delved into it in a great deal of detail, but it is that those who suffer extremely stressful childhoods have a life expectancy reduction of about 20 years.
And that's sort of one.
And the second is that those who experience stress, significant stress in their childhood, have up to a 49% increase in the rates of cancer.
And if we had parents who were forcibly making their children smoke, I can't imagine that the health effects would be all too different.
And so if we look at the toxicity of aggression against children as both a shortener of life expectancy and an environmental carcinogen agent, We would really act very strongly against parents who would expose their children to such toxicity that would have long-term negative health consequences.
But at the same time, we have such a difficult time with confronting this issue that physical violence has similar, if not the same, effects as other kinds of toxicities and confronting that as a society, not to mention the fact that this aggression, again, reproduces itself Almost virally in other social situations when the children get to be adults.
Yes, yes. Let me just reach for something I want to share with you.
I have a very short little leaflet in which I talk about how punishment can affect health.
I mention here that when a child is under stress, Due to punishment.
Can I read this? It's about five or six sentences.
Oh, please, by all means. I absolutely do.
Let me read this better than if I tried to do it from memory.
When the mammalian brain anticipates danger, it triggers a cascade of responses.
First, the hippocampus secretes corticotropin-releasing hormones, CRH. By the way, I may mispronounce some of these words.
Forgive me. Stimulating the pituitary to produce corticotropin.
The ACTH causes the adrenal glands to release cortisol and epinephrine.
The cortisol helps maintain energy-producing blood sugar, while the epinephrine increases heart and breathing rates, sending extra blood to the limbs.
These changes give the body a rapid energy boost to help protect itself against imminent danger.
As the threat subsides, the organism returns to the normal state.
Now, here's the part that we're getting to the point.
Exposure to long-term stress could have a very different effect.
It can produce chronic and debilitating symptoms such as memory loss, weakened immune system, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, skin problems, weight gain, and digestive disorders.
The process is essentially the same.
Whether it involves a laboratory rat being subjected to an ongoing regimen of electric shocks or a child living in fear of punishment, prolonged exposure to stress hormones on a child's developing brain, moreover, can permanently compromise the brain's ability to regulate emotion, aggression, attention and cognition.
That's the long-winded version of what you just alluded to.
The stress as a result of being battered by one's parents or one's teachers is toxic.
There's no other word for it.
It is toxic and it puts one's health at risk.
And it doesn't surprise me at all that people who've had that experience in childhood have shorter life expectancies and are more prone to illnesses.
Yeah, and I think, I mean, you're absolutely right, and again, we're two non-doctors talking about things we've read, but the stress hormone is so overwhelming, and cortisol has been implicated, as far as I've read, in these, it's not proven, but it's implicated in the increase in cancer risk that comes from those who've had traumatic childhoods.
Yes. But yeah, it is this overwhelming flood of hormones from the fight or flight mechanism that can't be controlled or regulated and so the child does not gain the ability to regulate emotion very well because emotions are so overwhelming based on the constant stressors within the environment.
That leads to impulse control, concentration problems and so on later in life and it's… It's just extraordinarily bad for the brain, and there does seem to be some difference in the brains of those who've gone through these kinds of childhood traumas relative to people who've had more peaceful and loving and productive environments.
So, yeah, it is really tragic, particularly what happens with the developing brain, you know, relative to something, you know, you and I get frightened as adults.
It's different because our brains have kind of done their thing, right?
But it's what happens early on that is specifically...
Right, exactly. The developing brain is affected by it, and those changes You pointed out before that what would you think of a parent who encouraged their child to smoke?
I could use this comparison.
What would you think of an alcoholic who is told that he should really have a beer before driving?
But do it in moderation.
You simply don't set up these, you don't invite danger.
You don't look for trouble.
And to say that, for somebody to say, well, look, I don't smoke.
I just take a puff occasionally.
Or to make excuses for drinking and then driving and say, well, it sharpens my senses and I've I've never had any problem.
I've turned out okay.
I've done it. And in my little booklet, I give some examples of that, my own childhood, being around smokers all my childhood.
Both parents smoked and visitors to the house smoked.
I was always exposed to tobacco smoke.
My mother smoked when she was pregnant with me.
And I could say, well, I turned out okay.
But what does that prove?
I was lucky. Not that the adults in my family were smart, but that we were lucky.
Yes, and certainly, I mean, I looked at those and you also mentioned like I rode without a bike helmet and I turned out okay, but that doesn't mean that it's good to ride without a bike helmet.
The difference being, of course, that when children are exposed to significant levels of violence or aggression within the household, I think that it affects them all.
Like, I think it affects all children that way, whereas you can kind of dodge a bullet, as you say, with secondhand smoke or with bicycle helmets, you know, the majority of kids will be fine.
But I think that that's not the case with violence within the home.
No, no. That leaves an impact always.
Yeah. Now, just before we wrap up here, I just wanted to give you the opportunity for people who are interested in this topic.
And I think if you're interested in the peace and happiness of the world, this is the most important topic.
You can go march against war and so on, but I think it's important to understand where aggression comes from in human nature.
I don't think it's innate to human nature at all.
But I think that it is provoked through aggression, particularly in childhood.
So I just wanted you to give a chance, if you could, to just list off resources that people might be able to get to.
And I'll put these links with the show so that people can – there's no spank.net, which is a website that you're affiliated with.
And it has great resources and, as you say, a thousand and one reasons not to spank and a thousand and one alternatives.
Is there anything else that you would like to list as resources for people who would be interested in Well, I have the little booklet, Plain Talk About Spanking.
If you go to the website, nospank.net, you'll see it referenced in a few places.
Right on the main page, the front page of the website, there's a link to it.
Readers are invited.
They can print their own copies.
They can contact me by mail, email, or telephone, and I'll send them a free copy of the 16-page booklet.
As I said, they can print them out themselves.
They can share the links.
They can bring other people to read that little booklet.
It's just 16 pages.
A person with a high school education can read it in about 10 minutes and understand it perfectly.
I'm constantly packing those up every day I get requests for that booklet.
And from people who are in child-related fields, teachers, psychologists, social workers, people are ordering it all the time.
And parents, of course.
Fantastic. So that offer is a standing offer.
As long as I'm able to pack those in an envelope and send them out, I will do that.
And, of course, it's on the website.
A person can read it there.
There's also two excellent books.
You can read the entire book on the website.
Alice Miller's For Your Own Good and Olivier Morel's new book that we just translated it from French to English.
The title is Spanking and then there's a subtitle which slips my memory at the moment, but you'll see it right on the front page.
The Miller book and the Morell book are side by side.
You can read the entire book right on the website.
I haven't read the book from the French author, but Alice Miller is a fantastic resource for exploring these kinds of things within yourself and within society as a whole.
She's just brilliant that way.
Yes, she was a pioneer and I'm proud to count her as a close friend, a long-standing friend of many years.
All her books are such a great contribution.
The For Your Own Good was published, I think, in 1979.
If you go on Amazon, you can probably find a used copy for less than the cost of postage.
Get it. I say get it, read it, learn it.
It's super. I really do appreciate you taking the time to have a chat with me today.
I will send you the links to the show when it comes out.
And I just wanted to – you're ahead of the curve from me and I just really wanted to thank you for the work that you've done in the world, in society, in your environment.
To help bring this awareness to people, it has certainly made the world a better place for me, just as I hope to sort of pass it down along the way.
So thank you so much for the lifetime that you spent getting these kinds of initiatives going and really bringing this awareness about the sadness and criminality of some of these actions.
It's been, I know it's a tough road to travel, but I just wanted to really thank you for the work that you've done.
It is a beautiful thing to see.
Well, and thank you for inviting me on.
I've enjoyed our conversation.
Fantastic. Take care. You too.
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