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Summary: This online report has been built as an interactive website and allows to browse through details of legislation in 20 countries in the Americas on the issue of corporal punishment.
In the year 2001, Save the Children Sweden committed itself publicly to stepping up efforts to secure the abolition worldwide of all physical and psychological punishment of children. Sweden was, in 1979, the first country to abolish from its national legislation all forms of corporal punishment of children. More than 25 years later, this decision has proven to be a good one: major indicators relating to domestic violence against children in Sweden have been declining ever since. Taking the Convention on the Rights of the Child as the basis for our work, and having agreed on the interpretation of Article 19 made by the Committee on the Rights of the Child as one that protects children from all forms of violence – including physical and psychological punishment – Save the Children Sweden has made it a priority to work across the world towards eradicating this practice from children’s lives. In Latin America today, a number of Save the Children Alliance members and partner organisations in more than ten countries are carrying out awareness-raising, capacity-building and advocacy programmes. All the initiatives are founded on the basic principle that no child should be subject to any form of violence, even where adults believe that what they are doing is for the well-being of the child. The programmes share the belief that children should be raised and educated in a loving, protective and safe environment, where they should not fear being beaten by their elders when they commit an error or when they do not live up to the expectations of adults. Save the Children Sweden believes that in order to achieve genuine and long-lasting change in the lives of children, legislation should send a clear message to society, completely eliminating any acceptance of physical punishment and degrading treatment of children. The research you are about to read has been commissioned with the objective of supporting public initiatives towards legal reform. For more than two years, the Andean Commission of Jurists has been investigating existing Latin American legislation on violence against children – particularly in the home, in schools, in the penal system and in alternative care institutions – in order to identify the positions of different countries on the physical and psychological punishment of children. The result is a highly detailed analysis of the existing legal frameworks in 20 states within the region, accompanied by recommendations for those states that seek to take a step forward in protecting their children from all forms of violence.