JS-6.4
Formation of Consciousness to Permit Corporal Punishment Based on a Questionnaire Survey on “the Life of High School Students in Okinawa, Japan”
In this paper, corporal punishment is defined as "a harmful stimulus inflicted on children by parents, teachers and others in the name of discipline".
Many countries have already prohibited all corporal punishment for children, but in Japan corporal punishment doesn’t only go away at school but it doesn’t also go away at home. There are many people who permit corporal punishment because they don’t connect corporal punishment with the Rights of the Child.
How is the consciousness of corporal punishment formed in each person?
Based on the preceding research, I created some hypotheses on the formation of consciousness that permits corporal punishment and I investigated this issue by using a questionnaire survey obtained by 936 high school students in Okinawa.
I tried covariance structure analysis using the variables that are composed of experiences of receiving corporal punishment, gender, household composition, male dominant consciousness, the feeling that the child’s own actions justify the corporal punishment, and the feeling of being loved by one’s parent(s). And so I obtained the following results:
(1) On the one hand, experiences of having received corporal punishment from one’s parent(s) enhance the consciousness to permit corporal punishment,
(2) On the other hand, the experiences lower the feeling of being loved by parent(s) and lower the consciousness that permits corporal punishment.
(3)As the feeling of being loved by the parent(s) increases, the consciousness to permit corporal punishment increases too.
Also, (4) the influence of the feeling that the child’s own actions justify the corporal punishment is the largest in the formation of the consciousness that permits corporal punishment. It is also followed by the feeling of being loved by the parent(s), and by the male dominant consciousness, etc.