Wife beating
Wife beating is the nonconsensual corporal punishment of a wife at the hands of her husband. If it involves spanking in a domestic setting, then it is a special case of domestic spanking in which the spanker is the husband and the spankee is the wife. It is not to be confused with domestic discipline, consensual.
Today, the term has negative connotations, although it has been traditionally accepted in many cultures that the husband, as head of household, had authority over his wife and this included the right of chastisement.
Legality
In very few legal systems is it explicitly permitted for the non-excessive, appropriate, non-abusive, corporal punishment of wives. Even within consenting BDSM or domestic discipline relationships, excessive punishment is frequently treated as a statutory assault. Many jurisdictions and countries have avoided the issue of domestic violence on the grounds it is a private matter and usually unsolvable by outside interference - this should not be mistaken for wife-beating being a legal act. There are countries, however, many of which are Islamic by culture, in which non-excessive wife-beating is socially accepted and legal to the present day.
The phrase "rule of thumb", is incorrectly attributed to an opinion rendered in 1782 by English judge Francis Buller that a man had a right to beat his wife with a stick provided it was no thicker than his thumb. It has also been asserted that this "rule of thumb" was inherited into American common law. Judge Buller's statement was at the time criticized as incorrect. Blakestone's 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England notes that wife-beating was actually prohibited under English law, although some courts generally exercised leniency in allowing husbands to apply "moderate correction" to their wives within "reasonable bounds," again, this was not due to the legality of the act, merely the choice of the judiciary not to intervene.
Religion
There is a frequently disputed Corporal punishment in the Qur'an line in the Qur'an that permits or encourages wife-beating, depending on the interpretation.
Spanking vs violence
The term "wife-beating" does not say anything about what body part is beaten, and how. So it can refer to anything from a Punch (page does not exist with a fist to a chastisement with a stick, cane, or another implement.
An interesting differentiation between socially unacceptable wife-beating (which was seen as "violence") vs. acceptable spanking smacking) of women (which was not) in the mid-20th century is discussed in Spanking in comics 1938-1970, section "Social Barometers".
"Spanking", then, was seen as something completely different from "beating". A similar distinction is found in the term "hitting".
See also
References
- " Word myths: debunking linguistic urban legends by David Wilton (2004)
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