An Observation

[Content Note: Corporal punishment.]

Two observations, actually, regarding Minnesota Vikings' running back Adrian Peterson, who is facing a child-abuse charge for spanking his four-year-old son.

1. "Domestic violence" is a term generally associated with intimate partner abuse, but it refers to all familial violence. That includes violence against children.

Part of the reason we tend to exclude violence against children in our discussions of and thinking about domestic violence is because there are people who would never argue in ten million years that violence is an acceptable consequence for an adult who will nonetheless defend quite vehemently the idea that violence is an acceptable consequence for a child.

It is a truly peculiar exception that we allow, under the auspices of parenting, to allow an adult to physically hurt a child. We generally don't tolerate adults hitting other adults who are misbehaving, nor do we tolerate children hitting other children, and children are never allowed to hit adults, but the most lopsided of all these power differentials—an adult hitting a child—is widely tolerated and even encouraged.

But, you know, only as long as it doesn't go "too far." That being arbitrarily defined by pretty much anyone and everyone else besides the child being harmed.

2. Over the last couple of days, I've seen so many defenses of spanking, from both progressives and conservatives, which are some variation on: "My parents hit me and I turned out just fine."

Good for you. But who cares.

I almost can't think of a more useless metric for social policy than anecdotal evidence some number of people manage to survive a societal harm without crumbling or turning into monsters.

Surely, we can do better than that. Surely we should.