New spanking study: Spare the Rod or Sexually Warp the Child?

I'll just put it out there right up front: I am opposed to spanking. The reasons are many and varied and I won't bore you with all of them; the bottom line is it's not right for my family, and I even get all Judgy McJudgerson (silently, usually) when I see other parents making the choice to discipline children via physical force. I've never had any problem justifying my choice, either.

Nor did I ever trot out "because it could warp them sexually later in life" as a reason why it might be better to find a different method of correction.

What? Oh, yeah. Apparently spanking has now been linked to coercive and risky sex practices later on in life:

New research by a University of New Hampshire domestic abuse expert says spanking children affects their sex lives as adults. Professor Murray Straus concludes that children who are spanked are more likely as adults to coerce partners to have sex, to have unprotected sex and to have masochistic sex.

Other studies have shown the link between spanking and physical violence, but Straus said his research is the first to show a link between corporal punishment and sexual behavior.

Apparently "it's important to model non-violent problem-solving skills" and "hitting a child only teaches him that being bigger means you can exert your will over someone else" weren't enough to stop some folks from smacking their kids. But now we can hope that the knowledge that paddling can lead to a life of perverse sex will staunch the urge to spank!

I kid. Sort of.

Over at Doc's Sunrise Rants, Doc reviews this recent study and makes short work of the results:

90% of parents are participating in an activity that 93% of researchers agree can cause psychological and physical damage to their children.

[...]

Parenting doesn’t come with a warning label, like a pack of cigarettes. You have to use common sense. Common sense dictates that hitting a child isn’t a good thing. Ever.

Jen of Demure Thoughts is ready to share her opinion that "studies are far and wide a crock of shit." But she particularly takes issue with the measures of what is "coercive" and "risky" according to Straus' assessment:

The third study, of 440 high school students from New Hampshire, examined risky sex, such as premarital sex without a condom.

I am going to state the obvious here, since everyone is thinking it. Teenagers are stupid and have this odd idea they are invincible and most these days seem totally unacquainted with consequences of their actions. The fact we have sexualized everything from perfume to cheeseburgers is the problem. If teenagers are screwing they are making a bad choice from the get go, why would you expect them to choose to use a condom? As for adults and risky sexual behavior, well I could probably find an equal number of idiots in the unspanked masses. Some folks are just too stupid to live.

LadyRebecca admits up front that she and her husband do use spanking to discipline their daughter:

We do spank our daughter. We spank her for disobedience and lying. We do not spank because we are angry. How we feel about a behavior does not (or should not) affect the punishment she may or may not receive. We punish, not because we are mad at her, but because she has disobeyed and her disobedience is deserving of punishment. Our goal in doing so is to teach her through a non-damaging process that there are consequences for behavior. We reward her when she does good and punish, sometime with a spanking, sometime with loss of privilege (toys or playing), when she does wrong, thus teaching that actions have consequences, for good and bad.

She goes on to pick apart the research, most notably in pointing out this little gem:

Notice how ’spanked’ is listed with ’slapped, hit, or threw objects at’? Not every parent who spanks automatically does these other things, which I think most people would agree are abusive and Strauss lumps them all together.

Again; I'm no fan of spanking. But I'm also not a fan of sloppy research, and I think this is a really valid point -- are we talking about spanking or about other forms of physical violence?

LadyRebecca finally posits:

So, my conclusion is that if you are spanking your child in a manner that is abusive, your child is more likely to be abusive, just like every study on abusive situations has proven time and time again. What this article does not prove is that healthy, responsible spanking, causes sex problems.

My personal position is closer to Doc's than to LadyRebecca's, but I still can't escape the feeling that this study may be a case of correlation mucked up with causation.

BlogHer Contributing Editor Mir also blogs at Woulda Coulda Shoulda and Want Not.