I’m not guaranteeing an answer here, but feel mightily compelled to take a stab at it.

Some months ago I was horrified to view a video clip of the current U.S. President [who has been confirmed by my fellow citizens to be our greatest man twice in recent years] advocate the black American tradition of ‘whooping’ children. He made this case before a large gathering which included black religious and political leaders. These people seemed to like what he had to say. To be fair, our own Dark Lord was not proposing a child-whooping initiative, but lamenting a passing tradition, even sighting yesteryear as better for raising children because ‘other members of the community’ would whoop your child if you were not on hand to administer the beating.

I spent the most intense four years of my life interviewing violent people who all had one thing in common, childhood violence of one form or another. I will take a stab at this question based on my research in the following areas:

1. My 4-year violence survey conducted from 1996 to 2000, and the subsequent Harm City material I continue to gather

2. My 10-year investigation into the origins and form of non-lethal civil human violence in support of my series of books on the origin and history of boxing

3. My life time obsessions with reading on primitive cultures, slavery and religion, which have been primarily utilized in my fiction

I have yet to formerly restructure the findings above as a project targeting this subject. I am dredging a crowded mind, so will steer clear of conclusions. I have been moved to write this primarily based on interviews with former children about by upcoming book Why Grownups Suck? This article is largely a question and offers no solid answers. When you read this, keep in mind that it is essentially an attempt to lineup clues for myself to explore at a later date.

Also, my reading in far eastern cultures is very patchy. Outside of boxing, I can’t even comment on Asian traditions. Therefore nothing I write here pertains to any human tradition west of Polynesia, north of Australia, or east of Samarkand. This is not intended to be a comprehensive work, but a series of informed leading questions. I do not even know how to slot this article, and am placing it in Harm City because so much of the pertinent human research comes from that slice of my writing.

I recently read a transcript of an interview with Steve McQueen, the filmmaker who brought us 12 Years A Slave. Steve was not interested in rehashing slavery. He was interested in pointing the finger at the kind of slavery going on now. This world has more slaves [largely kidnapped as was Solomon Northrup the protagonist in 12 Years A Slave] than ever, most of them nonblack. One point he made about the legacy of American slavery is the continued prevalence of belt ‘whoopings’ or ‘hidings’ administered to black children by their parents. The tenacity of culturally transmitted practices should never be underestimated.

I will return to this point in the conclusion. According to child psychologists striking a child is going to cause problems with that person’s development on many levels later in life. I would like to note here, that in Baltimore, virtually all violent crimes are committed by blacks, with blacks—male and female—20 to 40 times more likely to initiate violence than nonblack persons. I do not believe it is an accident that black women slap, punch, and whip their male children in public [I’ve seen it in yards, on sidewalks, in eateries and in supermarkets] and that these boys grow up to be more violent per capita than any group on the planet outside of the Juarez drug trade.

At 12 I was beginning to argue with my mother.

Now Mom came from a long line of Irish [originally 17th Century slaves] and German immigrants from the 1870s. German culture was famously stern and the Irish, famously violent. Furthermore, the Irish slaves she was descended from were handled by the British. The British navy had the most extended and brutal whipping tradition I have been able to trace. I suspect the whipping of slaves in British colonies stems from the tradition of whipping sailors.

Dad, on the other hand, was descended from Canadian immigrants who came to the U.S. circa 1900. My paternal grandmother told me that her side of the family was descended from British slave children that were sold to French families in Canada, and that her husband’s family was descended from those very same French Canadians. Her father had been a shipwright and an apothecary. When her parents made their way down into The States, they brought with them a belief in the nonviolent rearing of children. I do not know if that was a reaction against slave owner abuse or reflected a more benevolent kind of slave owner.

Imagine the impasse when, as I refused to eat my peas at dinner, and laughed at Mother’s assertion that ‘Ethiopian kids were starving somewhere and would be glad to have those peas’, when she demanded, “Ted, he needs a spanking!”

This struck us all as ridiculous, and she seemed none too comfortable with the idea, not wanting to do it herself. This was a cultural thing passed down by her mother, who was famous for breaking rulers on teenage boys, a tradition she probably picked up from Catholic nuns. I was shocked. My parents had never struck me, and the threat of Grandma hitting us with a ruler was something of a manly test of pain tolerance and comedy rolled into one. I felt betrayed too. To date, the only adult who had struck me, or otherwise abused me, was a tall blonde teacher from my first grade in Catholic school.

Dad stood, looked at me sternly, and took off his belt. He was a big strong dude compared to me, but I had never imagined him hurting a person. He then clenched his jaw and said, “Downstairs, now!”

Mom was horrified at the belt, this being the brutal form of punishment inflicted by uneducated blacks on their children. We were civilized for God’s sake!

I walked downstairs ahead of Dad. He then stopped me at the bottom of the landing, turned me around, and said, “Put your hands on the wall [heavy lacquered pine paneling] and scream out when I whip it.”

I put my hands on the wall, and Dad slapped that belt into the wall with such force it stunned me into a belated yelp. He then began cracking that insubordinate wall in earnest with me screaming in agony, until Mom came to the head of the stairs and demanding he stop. When I came upstairs laughing I think I saw some hurt in Mom’s eyes.

Dad taught me a lesson that day about rebelling against tradition, against wrong things that are done to others because they were done to us, or simply because they were done before. I must remember though, that whooping was not part of his family’s tradition, and he was essentially not rebelling at all, just making fun of those generations of drunken Irishmen and cruel Kraut taskmasters who believed in something far more ancient than either of their warped societies.

As someone who has read thousands of history books I can tell you that children are generally invisible in the historical record. There are some patchy records, some medieval manuals for the raising of noble children, some old letters from antiquity. But in general, children, through most of civilized history, have just been walking human precursors; adults in training.

If we go all the way back we can find films of monkeys hitting their young. Then, we have vast gulfs of nothingness with occasional snapshots, until we get to the 1700s. For the most part what we need to look at is civil violence of the sub-lethal variety. If it is tolerable for a rich man to beat a poor man, for a man to beat his wife, for a slaver to beat his slave, then we can infer that it was then acceptable for the slave to beat his wife, and for her to beat their children. The evidence we have today points to such dynamics.

People often assume that punching, for instance, is normal primate behavior. It is not. Punching is a learned cultural trait that is one of the last human activities to emerge in the archaeological record. Boxing for instance, is exceedingly rare, and only arises in stratified slave-based societies with certain military traditions. The first evidence for the beating of common people by authorities comes from Egypt. The first evidence for fist fighting comes from Mesopotamia. From these origins the practices tended to spread through cultural diffusion, not arise independently.

The ancient Greeks used the willow stick to beat boys. The Roman’s used heavier rods, whips and flails to beat their soldiers and slaves. From this point on, beatings as a socially acceptable form of social intercourse are transmitted through two parallel social vectors: professional militaries, and Christian religious institutions.

What about more primitive societies?

Oh, they were violent to be sure. I have not found any evidence of child abuse among pre-neolithic cultures. American Indians were often critical of Europeans for beating their children and driving their soldiers into battle, rather than teaching their children and leading warriors into battle. With very few exceptions, white children abducted and adopted by Native Americans did not want to return to their homes of Dickensian woe. I’m not advocating some ‘Dances with Wolves’ fantasy. American Indians were often cruel, smashing out the brains of enemy babies against trees, and torturing captives. They tended to be famously violent, and very successful in resisting European invaders, who they noticed relied on ‘broken spirited men’ who had been beaten as children and ‘driven like antelope’ into battle.

Also, I do not believe in racial superiority. Native Americans seem no more adverse to child abuse then Polynesians, another group of fighters that whipped European sailors and soldiers had a hard time dealing with in combat. Additionally, the Aztecs [civilized Native Americans] actually advocated child torture.

From all of my initial reading [and mind you this is pre-research reading] it seems to me that you get no evidence of child abuse or of acceptable civic violence until you see slavery, state religion and/or professional military organizations. In other words, violence against children seems to be a reflection of a highly organized, stratified and coercive society’s violence against their parents.

There are so many men in the age group 10 to 20 years older than I that have told me tales of brutality in Catholic schools that the subject deserves an article all its own. Some of the stories are worse than anything Hollywood has put out. In the 1970s I attended public schools where sadistic beatings of children on a highly selective basis were commonplace. Middleclass White America has just recently emerged from the medieval Catholic and British slave/sailor model of discipline. Is it any wonder that poorer and less educated segments of our society continue to perpetuate what had been perpetuated upon their great grandparents?

This nation was taken from aboriginal people by largely British immigrants who came from a brutalized society that fed children into death machine factories, believed in a Santa Claus that punished children, and beat virtually all of the children. If you doubt that, take note that today two thirds of British women admit to beating their infants!

Before we conclude that primitives are superior to civilized people, we must remember that us civilized child-abusers have driven primitives to extinction. There must, it follows, be a societal benefit to harsh childhood treatment and breaking the spirit of the innocent.

A few examples:

1. The Roman army was the best, and was led by centurions who carried a rod rather than a shield, it being more important to beat their men then defend against enemy spears.

2. The British navy was the best, crewed as it was by whipped and brutalized slave-sailors.

3. The Prussian military was the best, with the most brutal discipline of its age.

4. With the rise of modern armies in the 1600s officers ceased arming themselves for combat, but for discipline, like the Roman centurion. Every military buff knows the pistol to be useless in combat. It remains useful for shooting reluctant troopers in the back though. Despite the poor performance of these armies against primitive peoples, a slave army is much easier to replenish than an army of warriors. We just kept on coming.

5. Confederate slavers had small desire to encroach on Indian lands, as Indians were not a usefully servile population. The Confederate dream was to conquer Latin America, home to vast servile populations, broken by centuries of the Spanish whip.

The fact is, when a parent strikes their child, trust is loss, pain is inflicted, a bond is severed; a spirit is weakened. This is how animals are broken. A child who is beaten and broken is readymade for the overseer’s whip. And, in a more technologically advanced society that recognizes that beating children is wrong, than the back of the parent’s hand serves the greater society once again, as it drives the scarred child into the arms of our Mommy Nation, who is married to our Daddy President.