Murray A. Straus is founder and co-director of the Family Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire. He
is the co-author of Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families,
also available from Transaction.
Review
A comprehensive exposé of the corporal punishment controversy by an eminent scholar. Straus provides
the long needed scientific evidence linking corporal punishment to subsequent violence and other adult problems.
This book gives major new importance and credibility to the uphill effort to end corporal punishment of children.�
--Adrienne Ahlgren Haeuser, University of Wisconsin�Milwaukee
�Murray Straus has exposed �the best kept secret of American child psychology�: hitting kids is the dark force
in family life. Just as smoking was accepted a generation ago, corporal punishment is still okay in polite society.
However, like smoking, hitting emerges as a destructive anti-social act with serious costs to public health.�
--James Garbarino, Cornell University
Submitted by Transaction Publishers, September, 2001
Summary
Based on his studies of over 9,000 families, Murray A Straus, the foremost researcher on family violence in
the world, discusses the extent to which parents in the United States use corporal punishment (such as spanking
and slapping) and its effects on their children. The question of whether corporal punishment is an effective method
of discipline is hotly debated. Straus contends that this believed-to-be-�minor� form of physical violence is precursor
to much violence that plagues our world.
Children who are spanked quickly learn that love and violence can go hand in hand. Since spanking is generally
done by loving, caring parents�for the child�s own good�a child can learn that hitting is �morally right.� Straus
describes what he has learned through two decades of research: children who are spanked are from two to six times
more likely to be physically aggressive, to become juvenile delinquents, and later, as adults, to use physical
violence against their spouses, to have sadomasochistic tendencies, and to suffer from depression. Straus alerts
parents to these risks, and argues that spanking adversely affects not only the children who are subjected to it
but society as a whole.
This groundbreaking book, now available in paperback with a substantive new introduction and new concluding chapter,
is essential reading for parents as well as teachers, lawyers, and judges. Professionals in fields such as social
work, child protection, delinquency and criminology, psychology, and politics will find it of critical importance.
