Sweden, Norway and the USA Regulations of and Remedies for Corporal Punishment Against Children

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This comparative review briefly presents the legal positions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and of the Swedish, Norwegian and American legal systems with respect to parental corporal punishment of children (CP), then outlines and compares the available remedies and enforcement in practice when incidents of CP occur in each of the three countries.

‘Corporal’ punishment, for the purposes of this chapter, x2019 a physical touching of a child for the purpose of correcting the child's behaviour. In the term ‘parental ‘we include biological and adoptive parents and step-parents, but exclude consideration of violence committed by other caregivers or guardians, also to limit the scope of discussion.

In the past century many legal regulators have moved from viewing ‘mild’ CP of children as a parental right or even duty to viewing it as a harmful and abusive practice. In a growing number of jurisdictions – including Sweden and Norway but not the United States – CP is now a crime.

With this comparison, we test our hypothesis that actual legal consequences for various types of parental behaviour that can be defined as CP do not differ as starkly as one might initially expect when one knows only that CP of children is criminally punishable in Sweden and in Norway but lawful in all 50 states of the United States. We find this true to an extent, yet also describe significant differences in state actions taken when CP occurs in Sweden and Norway compared to in the US, including compensatory damages paid to children and potential criminal conviction of offending parents or removal of the child from the home. These consequences correlate with a much higher rate of CP occurring in the US than in these two Scandinavian countries today. We conclude with brief comments on the implications of our findings.

LEGAL LIMITS ON PARENTAL DISCIPLINE

Because of the widespread international approval of the UN's CRC, we begin with its position on the proper legal regulation of parents ‘behaviour as they guide the upbringing of their children, specifically its position on disciplinary practices collectively known as CP, then summarise the three studied countries’ approaches to CP regulation.