Corporal Punishment in South African Schools

Corporal punishment is a practice that has been banned in schools in a large number of countries around the world. This is due to the fact that that psychological research proves that in addition to this practice having a negative impact on children’s personal development; it was found that it also has a significantly adverse effect on society as a whole. In South Africa however, although corporal punishment has been outlawed since the drawing up of the South African Schools Act in 1996, there is evidence collected in recent years that revealing that the practice is still prevalent in local schools to this day.

Of the few cases reported of this practice, it has been found that some instances in which corporal punishment was administered have had very serious consequences. The most probable explanation for this could be that teachers sometimes go overboard in the infliction of punishment. It should be a source of discomfort to South African society to live with the thought that there are children who go to school to get “slapped, booted, whipped, pinched, and hit with sticks and wooden chalkboard dusters’’(Maree & Cherian, 2004, p.74) by their teachers. There is a glaringly obvious element of abuse in this form of teaching. In fact, the cases that have been reported in which a number of pupils were punished so severely, they were left with grievous or permanent body injuries (John, 2012, p.1).

The fact that physical punishment on school pupils is still a fairly common method used by educators to correct misbehavior is mostly a result of the people involved failing to report it (Verridjt, 2012, p.1). Another influencing factor is that a great number of teachers feel that corporal punishment is the one reliable way of ensuring c...

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