Since the 20th century, with the rise in awareness of children's rights, the question arises: Is corporal punishment discipline or abuse? The controversy has persisted across generations and cultures. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the ...
Since the 20th century, with the rise in awareness of children's rights, the question arises: Is corporal punishment discipline or abuse? The controversy has persisted across generations and cultures. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has made recommendations on the prohibition of corporal punishment of children, and major countries have begun to establish policies and systems to prohibit corporal punishment. As of 2023, 65 countries around the world have banned corporal punishment in the home, and Korea has become the 62nd country in the world to ban corporal punishment. In this study, we focused on the recognition of corporal punishment as a factor influencing the use of corporal punishment in the home, and analyzed the influencing factors at an integrated level by considering both micro and macro factors for corporal punishment perception. To this end, the most recent survey data, the 7th World Values Survey (WVS) (2017-2022), was used to construct micro and macro factors that affect the perception of corporal punishment from an ecological systems perspective, and to examine the influence of each factor separately. In the seventh round of WVS, 84,591 people from 64 countries were used for the final analysis. In this study, we aimed to examine the micro and macro factors that affect the perception of corporal punishment, and to determine whether there is any difference in the characteristics of national typology according to the level of institutionalization of laws related to the prohibition of corporal punishment. To this end, descriptive statistical analysis was conducted on the main factors influencing the perception of corporal punishment, cross-analysis (Chi-Square) and one-way ANOVA were performed to compare the mean difference by country typology, and multi-level model analysis was performed by incorporating micro and macro factors. The main findings of the analysis are as follows. First, the micro-factors influencing the perception of corporal punishment were the variables of education level, subjective household income, religion (Christianity, Buddhism), justification of wife violence, and justification of assault on others. In other words, the higher the level of education, the lower the subjective household income, the more Christianity and Buddhism than Catholicism, the more justified they thought violence against their wives was justified, and the more they thought violence against others was justified, the more they tended to view corporal punishment of their children as justified. Second, as macro factors, the level of respect for human rights in the analyzed countries and the variables of survival value versus self-expression value were found to have a statistically significant effect on the perception of corporal punishment. This meant that citizens were more likely to perceive the use of corporal punishment as legitimate when they lived in a country where they felt a low level of respect for human rights or perceived violence against others as justified. The lower the survival vs. self-expression values, the more justifiable corporal punishment was. Third, differences in countries with the level of institutionalization of laws prohibiting corporal punishment were statistically significant, especially when living in countries where violence against wives and assaults against others were perceived as justified. Consequently, this suggests that in order to improve the perception of corporal punishment, it is necessary to approach the micro and macro factors at the integrated level and to have appropriate policies and institutions appropriate to the characteristics of each country according to the level of institutionalization of laws related to the prohibition of corporal punishment.