Changing the Face of Corporal Punishment

Mpungu Primary school is located among one of the poorest and most densely populated neighborhoods of Lusaka. Violence is rampant, and the school is known to have one of the highest rates of Corporal Punishment in Zambia. Although the practice was abolished in 2003 when the 1996 Education Act Cap 137 was amended, this has not translated well into the reality on the ground in most schools in Zambia. As facilitators for an after school program called Peace Clubs, our team chose Mpungu as a simple starting place to dig a little deeper into the issue of Corporal Punishment. Could change be possible?


In our first workshop, I sat on a wobbly plastic chair in a dark classroom among the 35 pupils we had called into discuss physical abuse. When we asked them to tell us stories of the physical violence they receive as punishments, they  were practically jumping over each other with an endless supply of personal anecdotes. My stomach turned as I wrote down statistics like “35 out of 35 pupils have been beaten with a whip” or “28/35 pupils have experienced ‘stick handsy’ – a painful punishment that involved placing  sticks between each finger and squeezing the fingers together until they practically break .” To my dismay, it didn’t stop at physical violence. I filled the entire chalkboard at the front of the classroom with names that they have been called by their teachers, such as rat, cockroach, head like a pumpkin and useless.  Pupils also named several cases of violence within the home. They reported being accused of stealing,  being forced to sweep and clean for long hours, while others claimed to be beaten with a stick of a guava tree or a cooking stick when they committed offenses.  

A 10 year old girl was in charge of drawing water every  morning in a 10 Liter container. One boy who was living with his step parent and was in charge of all the household chores, while the girls took care of the babies. One child was responsible for going across town to buy foods for his mother to sell at the market before school at 5 am. The stories seemed endless. There also seemed to be an evident connection to home and school life, as most children who reported coming late to school were the ones subjected to corporal punishment from the teachers. Though the pupils laughed as they told me these stories, I couldn’t help but question where the justice was in this, or what was unconsciously happening to each child’s development. South African researchers at the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention Jesse Mconnell, Tarrio Mutongwizo, and Kristen Anderson state, “As corporal punishment is itself the infliction of physical violence on a child by usually an adult or authoritative figure, it bears within itself a legitimization of violence which is passed on to its victim. It signals the acceptability of dealing with conflict or expressing one’s feelings of anger by hitting others in realization or in offence. Children are natural imitators- they learn the language and social behaviour by imitating their parents. Children assume that their parents and teachers conduct themselves appropriately, and children replicate accordingly.”

In our next meeting with only the teachers of Mpungu, I struggled to hide my anger towards the people who had inflicted pain to the pupils I had just met. But surprisingly, Issa Embolo - the founder of Peace Clubs - handled the situation with more grace than I could have. He began the workshop simply by asking the teachers to come up with a list of challenges they face with pupils in the classroom such as noise making, late coming, and fighting.  Doing this activity helped to create a mutual understanding of how challenging children can be at an early age, which created a gateway for more honest dialogue as we continued. Issa added that the purpose of our workshop was not to encourage or justify a child’s misbehavior, but stressed that the way we punish them needs to fundamentally change.

While the teachers all agreed with us that beating should be eliminated in the home and classroom, they admitted that they honestly did not know what other method to take when it came to disciplining a child. The act to eliminate corporal punishment is a fairly new concept to Zambians, considering that physical violence as a form of punishment has been a deeply embedded philosophy that was taught to them by their parents, grandparents, and far down the family line. I struggled with their heartfelt questions about what is considered “good punishments” and “bad punishments”, because I knew that the answer wasn’t that simple. However, one suggestion we made was that the length and severity of the punishment should be equivalent to a child’s age and circumstance. For example, though picking up papers is not technically considered physical violence, making a child pick trash around the school yard for the entire day under the boiling sun begins to deprive children of their basic human needs and right for education.  A further look needs to be taken at how punishments can affect a child’s association with going to school. For many children in Zambia, school has become a place where they fear getting beaten, not an environment that fosters growth and learning. Beating a child becomes a simple solution to a complex problem. It take less than 5 seconds to slap a child across the face, but it takes much longer to sit down with them to understand why the child is acting out in the first place. And often times, teachers only see one half of the equation. Though it may look like a child is deliberately coming late to school, without more dialogue or connection to the home they may not know that the child is being forced by the parents to run to the market across town each morning to buy food.

The teachers seemed open to new methods, but were stilled overwhelmed by how to change this system of punishment. So, we decided to give them three months. We challenged the teachers to take what we discussed to heart, and to experiment with new forms of discipline and use it as an opportunity for creativity and discovery.



 
When we returned 3 months later, we met separately with the teachers and students just like we had in our first meeting. Against my skepticism, the children explained to us that during the time we were absent, there were almost no cases of corporal punishment in their home or school. The statistics I wrote down were no more than “1/25 or 0/25” on punishments like being slapped, kicked, or punched. We asked the students what types of punishments they were given when they misbehaved, and they reported that most of the time they were told to pick up papers around the school. However, this time they were allowed to work in groups of 2 or 3 and it was always after school hours.

Upon meeting with the teachers, we were surprised to find how active they were in experimenting with new approaches to discipline. They came to the conclusion that if change in physical violence is to occur, there must be more dialogue between both the teachers and parents, and teachers and pupils. The teachers are now placing more of a priority on developing personal relationships with pupils in order to discover the root causes of why they may be acting out in class, rather than just resorting to violence. Through this, they have found a direct tie from the issue of late coming to parents forcing children to work for them in the morning. They are now addressing this issue with parents when they come in to pay school fees for their child at the beginning of each term. Since this dialogue started, there have been hardly any issues with pupils coming late to school.

The teachers were also getting more creative about how they handle misbehaviour. When a child was acting out in class one day, one teacher decided to do a “role swap” with the child, where the teacher acted out as the pupil disturbing the class, and the pupil was given the role as the teacher to try and figure out how to manage the behaviour. Putting the pupil into the teachers shoes will be a lasting example of difficult it can be to control a classroom. Mr. Tempo, a teacher at Mpungu reflects on the experience by saying, “We have achieved a lot of things through this experiment. We are happy because we are not experiencing the same misbehaviour in the classroom that we were before.”

I left the classroom of Mpungu Primary school that day with a changed attitude towards tackling the issue of corporal punishment. The teachers I once bitterly resented transformed into powerful symbols of positive development, and tore down my pre-conceived notions about how effective small attempts can be.  Change will not happen overnight, but running away from an issue that demands our attention will do greater harm to the pupils as they grow and develop. Teachers at Mpungu have proved how this cycle can be broken if we allow creativity and openness to replace old imbedded philosophies on the effectiveness of violence.




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