BBC News – Childhood bullying ‘damages adult life’.

This seems to be good evidence that being either the victim of bullying or the perpetrator of bullying in childhood (or both) is strongly correlated with negative behaviors and outcomes in adult life. If school bullying can have such profound and long-lasting consequences, then parental bullying is almost certainly even more damaging. From a school bully there is some respite, some time away from them every day, but from a bullying parent there is no escape.

Bullying is defined as “the act of intimidating a weaker person to make them do something.” This is also an accurate description of smacking/corporal punishment, which is still a widely practiced parenting technique, and is still deemed morally acceptable by society in general; this is reflected in the current law in the UK which allows ‘reasonable punishment’ to be used as a defense by parents and guardians. Children are the only group of people in society that can be legally hit and hurt.

Violence and reason are opposites, and so ‘reasonable punishment’ is an impossibility in the same way that a ‘truthful falsehood’ is. It can never be reasonable to use violence against a child. The very term ‘reasonable punishment’ is a contradiction, an irrational concept granted the appearance of truth by being declared a law. We can ignore this flaw in our morality, and indeed the vast majority of society does, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring it, which is the moral, spiritual and even material degradation of society as evidenced by scientific studies such as this one and many others.