Ask most older North Carolinians to reminisce about secondary school and the time they were in deep trouble. It is not uncommon to get stories about corporal punishment. Most people expect these types of things from the past but corporal punishment is still used in North Carolina today.

In the 2014-15 school year, 147 separate incidents of corporal punishment were doled out. The report is very long, but only three pages of it deal with corporal punishment. One section stood out among the rest:

“Corporal punishment was assigned to 124 individual students. Of the124 students, 108 received corporal punishment once, ten students received it two times,

five students received it three times, and one student received it four times.“

Sometimes, it just takes four whoopings to get your point across.

Additionally, it is interesting to look at the gender break down; roughly 1/6 of the physical violence occurred on girls and then the remaining 5/6 on boys. Do schoolboys transgress that many times over or is it that the punishments are unjustly handed out to boys over girls?

It should also be noted, that the vast majority of school districts ban the use of corporal punishment at the local level. It is only four counties (Robeson, Graham, Macon and Swain) that reported the use of corporal punishment. Outside of these counties, teacher will likely lose their job once they lay their hands on a student. See here for a current incident.

Thus, next time your child gets slapped, paddled, hit or physical abused (unless you live in Robeson, Graham, Macon and Swain) by a teacher at their school, you should call the police and then your attorney to ensure it doesn’t happen again.