Are Police Beatings and Corporal Punishments Related?

Why are there so many beatings by police officers? We know that police officers have difficult, dangerous jobs, but that doesn’t explain why some officers beat up citizens and others don’t. As a psychoanalyst, I wonder if the police officers who engage in such violence were subjected to beatings as children. For many people, corporal punishment is an ordinary part of growing up in this country.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for a ban on corporal punishment, noting that its use is associated with increased aggressiveness in children. Research has also shown that the use of corporal punishment is correlated with decreased “executive functioning” and diminished performance on intelligence tests. The more frequent the spanking, the lower the IQ is likely to be. Moreover, corporal punishment teaches children that violence is okay and that it is okay for those who are older, bigger, stronger, and in positions of authority to inflict pain on those who are younger, smaller, weaker, and lack authority.

Psychoanalysts have long observed a phenomenon known as “identification with the aggressor,” a process in which the victim of violence, as part of the reaction to victimization, wishes to become like the victimizer. You might think that a victim of violence would not want anyone to hurt other people, and many don’t, but it also feels a lot better to be on the giving than the receiving end of the pain, and there is always a wish for revenge. Children can’t beat their parents, but they can wait for the opportunity, when they are big and strong, to dish out what they received.

As of 2018, at least 58 countries had banned corporal punishment of children, but the United States is not among them, and corporal punishment is legal in all 50 states. Our tolerance of corporal punishment demonstrates a national failure to value our children. Violence against children also affects how they behave as grown-ups. Given what we know about the effects of corporal punishment, we should not be surprised that our movies, and our streets, are filled with violence.

There is a lot of public discussion, as there should be, about racial factors in police violence; in this instance, all of the officers who beat this Black man to death are themselves, Black. Research long ago proved the existence of internalized racial self-hatred. In the Doll Test Experiment, researchers showed young children black and white dolls and asked them which was the “pretty” one and which was the “good” one. Even young Black children adopted the larger society’s prejudices and chose the white dolls as more attractive and morally superior. (Doll Test videos, painful to watch, can be viewed on Youtube.) Just as with racism, we have research that shows the damaging effects of corporal punishment. Thanks to the activism that has followed from racially motivated shootings and beatings, racism, both implicit and explicit, is a significant part of our national dialogue. Now we need to talk about corporal punishment as well.

We know that it is very difficult for human males to tame their aggression, and to use it constructively instead of destructively. And we know that police officers have difficult jobs, in which they have to both use and control their aggression, often while risking their lives in very ambiguous and threatening circumstances. But we also know that corporal punishment makes it even more difficult to control your aggression when you have been beaten yourself and that it makes you more likely to want to beat someone. We need to study how to educate the police about the effects of corporal punishment.

Our public discussion of corporal punishment must include how it hurts children physically and emotionally, how it makes them less intelligent, and how it breeds violence. We need to help the many adults who continue to suffer from the corporal punishment they received as children and who are now inclined to beat their children. In addition to helping patients, mental health professionals also have a role to play in educating the public about the consequences of corporal punishment, and in helping our country catch up to the rest of the civilized world in protecting our children from it.