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RESEARCH AND CHILDREN:Tonga |
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Children's feelings about parental corporal punishment
A survey of adolescents in schools was carried out by an ethnographer who had been a schoolteacher in Tonga examined their feelings and beliefs about parental corporal punishment. The children explained the punishments as being because of their parents' love, given because they deserved it and to teach them, but they also experienced it as a withdrawal of love and the majority reported negative responses to the punishments. The two most common responses were repentance and guilt, followed by anger (23.8%) and sadness (22.9%). The children reported feeling lonely, unwanted, afraid, not wanting to eat or talk, wanting to run away, wanting to die. Some said they hated their parents and wanted to punish them.
(Morton, H., 1996, Becoming Tongan: An Ethnography of Childhood, University of Hawai'i Press, USA, reported in Save the Children, 2005, Discipline and punishment of children: a rights-based review of laws, attitudes and practices in East Asia and the Pacific - Save the Children Sweden Southeast Asia and the Pacific, regional submission to the UN Secretary General's Global Study on Violence against Children, Save the Children Sweden)