9 yr/old girl dies after being forced to run for 3 hours

[IceAlisa]

If the grandmother had told the girl to run 3 laps, it wouldn't have been a big deal.....

Obviously.

[bek]

Obviously.

Its the same thing with spanking, slight spanking is different from beating your child to the pulp.

Personally I like to think if "spare the rod" as a metaphor. There are other ways to discipline children without that.

[zippy]

If something is legal, it is more likely to be socially acceptable.

If something is illegal, it is less likely to be socially acceptable.

And yes, approving Proposition 8 could potentially result in an increase of homophobic sentiment and incidents.

LOL, seriously? Are you not familiar with the multitude of ridiculous laws that are still on the books in states across the US, just because state legislatures are apathetic about removing them? For example, oral sex is illegal in 18 states including Oregon and Minnesota but I'm pretty sure it's socially acceptable. Many people probably have no idea it's even illegal. Supposedly in Alabama it's illegal for a woman to change clothes in the presence of a photograph of someone of the opposite sex. I actually had no idea that there was still no statewide law against corporal punishment in schools; having grown up in them and worked in both urban and rural schools in Alabama, I have honestly never seen this employed. I suspect when it does happen, it's rooted in poverty and a lack of resources in the schools for teacher training/counselors for managing difficult kids, which may be why the incidence is somewhat higher in southern states than elsewhere. A few northern and western states report low numbers of hitting/spanking students regardless of its illegality.

As for corporal punishment, I couldn't easily find any research (but then I didn't really look at academic databases) but I am willing to make a bet that the majority of people in Alabama do support corporal punishment.

And you're saying this based on your vast experience of life in Alabama, gained how? Ever met an Alabamian? Actually, the only people I know who openly support spanking children live in Washington state. I've seen it in restaurants I suppose, at about the same frequency in Alabama as in other regions of the US. I've seen plenty of Europeans spank their kids. I'm not sure what this has to do with the case at hand, anyway.

ETA: There's your figures. Not Alabama but US-wide: http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...,56808,00.html
Sixty-one percent of all respondents felt regular spanking was an acceptable form of punishment. Even more surprising, thirty-seven percent of parents of young children believe it's acceptable to spank children younger than two. And as a corollary befitting the old adage "spare the rod, spoil the child," fifty-six percent believe a 6-month old baby can be spoiled by too much attention.

I don't really see what this study has to do with the topic, but as a statistician I would just like to point out that it'd be important to see the actual survey to see how the terms were defined for the participants and evaluate possible biases. For one thing, there's spanking, and then there's *spanking*. Some who answered that spanking was acceptable may have had slight swatting in mind, not real hitting, if the survey didn't specify. And there is a pretty widespread idea about letting babies "cry it out" when training them to sleep through the night, that it toughens them up or something. That could be on the minds of respondents when they answered that question, if it's worded as vaguely on the survey as in the article. Also, was there no stratification by age, geography, or anything else?

[zippy]

Nobody said child abuse is social acceptable. That's just hyperbole.

I was primarily looking at these quotes when I wrote that:

Yeah, I know I was being a jerk, but it is pretty well known that physical punishment is part and parcel of Southern culture. This horrible story made me think of that viral video of a *Family Court* judge in Texas beating the living sh*t out of his daughter.

IMO, when physical punishment is so ingrained in a cultural area, you have stories like this one.

You left out that Alabama is in the South where corporal punishment and more harsh forms of punishment are more social acceptable.

I'd call 'more harsh forms of punishment' child abuse, but that's just me. FWIW, I've seen straight up beating of children in schools passed off as corporal punishment (not in the US). In the US, corporal punishment may usually refer just to spanking, but the term itself means physical punishment in any form (corporal = physical after all). I'm not really trying to argue with your general POV, just asking that people be more thoughtful in making these broad statements. To suggest that what happened to this girl is even remotely socially acceptable is just really abhorrent.

[IceAlisa]

To suggest that what happened to this girl is even remotely socially acceptable is just really abhorrent.

ITA.

[zippy]

Thanks IceAlisa . And thanks to Prancer also, both of you have made some very good points in this thread.

[MacMadame]

I'd call 'more harsh forms of punishment' child abuse, but that's just me.

It depends on what you mean by it. I was thinking of things like making people do 100 push-ups in gym class if they miss catching a ball. That seems pretty harsh to me.

If I had meant child abuse, I would have said so!

[IceAlisa]

Well, when my college ballet class was overfilled, the teacher had us do a 100 relevées to weed out the weak.

[MacMadame]

So I went searching for some scholarly links about stereotyping and survival and mostly found opinion pieces and stuff created for a more general audience that refers to some of the scholarly work but mostly without an actual cite. (So you can't check if they are misquoting the source or not.)

In a lot of them they distinguish between "good" stereotyping and "bad" stereotyping. In some articles, the good kind was called "generalizations" or "group generalizations" and the bad kind "stereotypes". In another article, though, stereotype was used to describe the general phenomena and prejudice was used for when stereotyping caused harm. So that makes it all more complicated since people can't even seem to agree on what these words mean!

Anyway, this 20/20 article talks about stereotyping in general and how it's a survival mechanism and then talks about a bunch of studies that show that pretty much everyone stereotypes whether they realize it or not.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=...1#.T0gGqIcgd5I

It's not very rigorous (it's 20/20 after all) but I found it interesting.

Apparently we stereotype because we want to associate with people in our pack and ostracize people not in our pack because that's safer. Well that's what John Stossel says anyway. So it has to be true, right?

[AlexDSSF]

I saw the story on Nancy Grace yesterday, and my first reaction was to beat those two sorry excuses for women and caretakers up. (You probably would too, even if you were a woman.) And I still want to. Those women could have done the right thing and explained to her what chocolate can do to her body, if it's true that she did have that condition. But they didn't. They chose the worst way possible to send a message. They should at least be slapped across their faces at sentencing. Preferably by each relative of the dead girl. 9 times. Okay, I'm being over-dramatic, but when you hear something like this, it sickens you.

[Asli]

This is such an insane story. It's incredible that the child didn't just stop and sit down when she was exhausted. She must be absolutely terrified of the stepmother and grandmother, otherwise it seems impossible to make any child run for that length of time.