« What's the real European growth rate? | Main | The Spanish idea of the film canon »
Spanking and Sex
Spanking Kids Increases Risk Of Sexual Problems As Adults.
Spanking Children Causes Sexual Problems Later in Life.
Researchers have uncovered another damaging consequence of spanking: risky sexual behaviors, or even sexual deviancy, when the child grows up.
Those are three headlines about a new study by long-time spanking opponent Murray Straus. All are nonsense. Straus's study, which does not appear to be available yet but which is described at the links, surveyed "14,000 university students in 32 nations." The basic finding is that survey responses about being spanked in childhood are correlated with verbally and physically coercing someone into having sex as an adult.
Need I shout it from the rooftops? Correlation does not imply causation!
Here is a simple alternative explanation of the data. Bad kids are spanked a lot. Bad kids turn into bad adults.
I bet MR readers can suggest several other explanations as well. In addition, there are a number of other oddities with the study including some which lend support to my potential alternative explanation, I'll mention a few of these in the extension.
By the way, I'm not a proponent of spanking.
Addendum: Andrew Sullivan offers further analysis.
Here are some more oddities about the study. According to this report:
"the study found that 29 percent of the male and 21 percent of the female students had verbally coerced sex from another person....The percentages of those who physically forced sex were much lower: 1.7 percent of the men and 1.2 percent of the women...."
Don't these percentages seem very high? Especially for the women?
And get this,
"Straus found that 15 percent of the men and 13 percent of the women had insisted on sex without a condom at least once in the past year.
Using the four-step corporal punishment scale, Straus found that of the group with the lowest score on the corporal punishment scale, 12.5 percent had insisted on unprotected sex. In contrast, 25 percent of students in the highest corporal punishment group engaged in this type of risky sex."
13 percent of the women insisted that the man not use a condom?
More importantly, I believe that there is a causal connection between child abuse (rather than spanking) and later problems of violence but to me a connection between the kid being spanked and later engaging in risky sex is especially suggestive that the connection is a risk-loving person. Children who take a lot of risks, like running out on to the street a lot, are going to get spanked more. Later these same children also engage in risky activities. Not having seen the data I would be willing to bet that spanking is also correlated with skydiving, not wearing your seatbelt, gambling, and many other risky behaviors which are plausible not caused by spanking.
Finally, how about this for a non sequitur of the day:
"because over 90 percent of U.S. parents spank toddlers, the potential benefits for prevention of sexual and relationship violence is large,” Straus says."
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on March 3, 2008 at 07:44 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Alternatively: Children who got spanked often are genetically predisposed to becoming spanking adults since they carry the same genes their spanking adults do.
Posted by: Conny at Mar 3, 2008 7:53:10 AM
"Correlation does not imply causation!"
...sounds like somebody needs a timeout.
Posted by: Baysharam at Mar 3, 2008 7:53:42 AM
13 percent of the women insisted that the man not use a condom?
Exactly why is a mystery to me, but yes, women do this. In fact, every women I've ever been with has at some point tried to talk me into sex without a condom. (Granted, not many--this thread could use some input from men with higher Ns, or at least more low-N men.)
Also, this study needs to control for IQ. Spanking is relatively low-class (or, if 90% of parents spank, it might be better to say that not spanking is high-class), people in lower classes tend to have lower IQs, and I suspect that most of these behaviors are more common among people with low IQs.
Posted by: Brandon Berg at Mar 3, 2008 8:07:41 AM
Hmm.
"Correlation does not imply causation!"
"Bad kids are spanked a lot."
From firsthand experience (as a school teacher and as a child of abusive parents): Whether a child is "bad" or not does not determine the severity or appropriateness of parental discipline.
Posted by: Mike McHugh at Mar 3, 2008 8:08:12 AM
I wonder if any of those clever labor people have found a time when kids were chosen at random and spanked.
Posted by: Michael Powell at Mar 3, 2008 8:21:57 AM
Damn.. the title gave me wrong impressions :(
Posted by: Chewxy at Mar 3, 2008 8:25:50 AM
"Here is a simple alternative explanation of the data. Bad kids are spanked a lot. Bad kids turn into bad adults."
I see, so bad kids are an exogenous factor.
How about dysfunctional people - often those with sexually dysfunctional behavior as well - rear dysfunctional (what you call bad) kids, who the dysfunctional parent then feels warrant spanking. Voila! And the cycle repeats itself.
Posted by: Me at Mar 3, 2008 8:26:45 AM
i'm thinking measurement error, which is notoriously bad for retrospective measures. it's easy to think how a spanking fetishist would be more likely to recall (or imagine) childhood spanking.
Posted by: Gabriel at Mar 3, 2008 8:49:14 AM
Tyler, shouting from the rooftops tends to get you in trouble with the neighbors. But hey if that's what it takes to get a few more people to know the difference between correlation and causation, I say go for it.
BTW it's "non sequitur" (no hyphen, no e) rather than "non-sequiter" which I'm sure you know but I can't seem to stop myself from pointing it out. Great that you used it in the logical sense as opposed to the humor sense though. Not that you don't have a sense of humor... but I digress.
Posted by: Ralph Leibniz at Mar 3, 2008 9:11:45 AM
Everyone here has made a good point (I was thinking the same thing Chewxy).
I don't think you can argue that "bad kids get spanked more" any more easily than assuming the opposite (that children's behavior doesn't effect whether the child is spanked).
There are marginal cases where the parent will spank if the child is bad, but if not they won't spank the kid ever. But probably in most cases, the parent is inclined to spank *when* a kid is bad (most kids will be bad at least once), or will be predisposed never to spank the kid no matter how bad they are.
But, the study needs to sort that out. And it also needs to sort out some of the other issues raised here.
Posted by: liberty at Mar 3, 2008 9:26:23 AM
"Verbal coercion" is a vague enough concept to cover the entire range of situations from, you had to ask twice, to, they assented under verbal threats. Who knows what it meant to any given respondent, and so no, the number doesn't seem high. As for physical coercion, the numbers are below the threshold where I trust human intuition to discriminate between rare and really rare events.
Posted by: Cyrus at Mar 3, 2008 10:21:05 AM
What is with all the "spanking kids is abuse" people nowadays? I simply don't understand it. Spanking has worked as an incentive to behavior modification for a long, long time, and not everyone in the world is damaged or a lunatic because of it. Good grief...
I was spanked a few times as a child, and I haven't turned into a criminal or a sexual deviant. I also have a very close and loving relationship with my parents. What's the frigging problem?
I propose that a portion of society's problems come not from too-harsh parenting, but from parents nowadays being far too lenient. More evidence of the feminisation of our culture, I fear. And it is to no one's benefit.
/Rant
Posted by: AJ at Mar 3, 2008 10:49:57 AM
To paraphrase Judith Rich Harris, spanking is wrong because it's wrong for big, strong people to hit small, weak people.
It hurts, you know. And not just physically. I remember very well.
Posted by: LemmusLemmus at Mar 3, 2008 11:06:53 AM
My father had a very large leather belt, and on a couple of occasions my brother and me got a whupping.
Never without just cause I might add. The belt had a huge deterent effect, and rarely left the closet.
Neither of us turned into deviants, or wife beaters, or child abusers.
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt at Mar 3, 2008 11:07:23 AM
In response to Brandon and Alex -
Yes, women don't like to use condoms anymore than men do. From my experience anyways.
Posted by: Infinite at Mar 3, 2008 11:10:16 AM
Spanking has declined over the past 75 years and risky sexual behavior has increased.
Posted by: 8 at Mar 3, 2008 11:25:39 AM
@LemmusLemmus:
Judith Rich Harris is a fool. The relationship between parents and children is not one of equals or even peers. Parents have a responsibility to ensure that their children grow up knowing right from wrong, as the evaluative ability is essential to the successful navigation of the world. It is a matter of their very survival that children be taught not to do certain things, and one of the ways to teach them is through reasonable physical punishment.
As with so many things, the virtue or vice in corporal punishment is in its use.
If you're spanking a child for spilling milk on the floor, you're wrong. If you're doing it because they got bad grades on their macaroni pictures (or some such other silly thing) you're wrong. If you do it because they intentionally broke something in a tantrum or physically hurt one of their siblings, then the punishment is justified.
It isn't a retributive act, it's a learning tool. It can be abused, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it.
Posted by: AJ at Mar 3, 2008 11:45:03 AM
I have heard a lot of hogwash in my life and this is as smelly as it gets. To try to relate spanking
to sexual exploitation is idiotic. The purpose of spanking is to modify negative behavior, and
when applied with love and an explaination is effective. I rather think that exposure to 24 hrs
of violence, murder, sexual exploitation and graphic pornography probably inflames sexual desires
more, DA! It is a lack of moral absolution, and an increase of moral relativism that has created
this phenomenon. Kids are taught explicitly and implicitly to question and push all authority.
There are no boundries taught and no inherent respect for anothers personal autonomy. Don't blame
this on spanking. Blame it on the Evolution of Humanism!
Posted by: rfl at Mar 3, 2008 11:54:00 AM
Those percentages actually seem far too LOW to me. I would expect the proportion of people to have sex without condoms to be at 40%.
As to physically coercing sex...those numbers don't exactly surprise me.
Posted by: Robert Olson at Mar 3, 2008 12:17:47 PM
If I did to another adult what the child-beating advocates do to their children, I'd be guilty, rightly, of battery.
Why is it okay to batter a child, but not another adult?
Posted by: bartman at Mar 3, 2008 12:18:40 PM
BTW, this article was posted by Alex, not Tyler.
Posted by: bartman at Mar 3, 2008 12:20:19 PM
There are a number of states that allow corporeal punishment in schools. Alec Gercu explores the impact on student perfomance on standardized tests, all else equal, in a chapter in his dissertation compeleted here at Clemson. His econometric approach avoids the type of issue that you raise, and he find a mildly deterring effect on math scores. There is also some earlier work by Clark Nardenelli on the whipping of child labor in early British factories. A wage premiun developed.
Posted by: bob tollison at Mar 3, 2008 12:23:15 PM
1) Tyler is NOT arguing "Bad kids are spanked a lot. Bad kids turn into bad adults." He is, without working very hard, simply offering an alternative hypothesis for the data that the study made no effort to exclude.
2) While I (a male) have never been coerced into sex without a condom, I HAVE had to make the choice between without a condom and not at all. As this was a girl I very much trusted, I went without a condom. To this DAY I almost invariable go without a condom, but since I have been married over 20 years I really don't feel this "risky behavior" is necessarily related to the spankings I had as a child.
3) Nevertheless, why waste your spankings on ungrateful kids when there are so many grateful adults available?
Posted by: jens fiederer at Mar 3, 2008 12:27:08 PM
Ooops, yes......."Alex is not arguing...."
Posted by: jens fiederer at Mar 3, 2008 12:29:12 PM
Why is it okay to batter a child, but not another adult?
1) In the law, it is recognized that children are not capable of reasoning as adults. Thus it should be no surprise that disciplinary methods with children emphasize baser reinforcement mechanisms (spanking versus tax incentives). In general, as children grow up and their faculties improve, the role of spanking diminishes.
2) It's a punishment, not a random assault.
3) Adults are legally responsible for the actions of their children. Adults are not (generally) responsible for the actions of other adults.
4) The number of minor infractions for which punishment is needed is far greater for a child than for an adults. Other popular punishment mechanisms (grounding / time-out) are much more time-intensive for the adult. Eliminating spanking would decrease efficiency.
An aside - I also think corporal punishment should be brought back for adults. Still serves as a deterrent/punishment, but without the loss of economic productivity associated with incarceration (it is also scale-independent of income in terms of its deterrent/punishment effect). Of course, there's situations where incarceration is needed, but for other cases a good public caning or flogging should be much more effective than a week in the slammer.
Posted by: Jody at Mar 3, 2008 12:34:32 PM
