Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>Doing the same thing to an adult can get you an assault charge, or a punch in the face.

Only people in a capacity of authority do the same thing to adults all the time when they're hard to control / reason with: imprison them, beat them and pin them down when they are unruly, restrain them, taze them, some countries have corporal punishment, and several other things besides.

What many modern parents did is exchange some slap and/or light hitting (which is not the same as abuse) with an arsenal of psychological manipulation, negotiation tactics, and guilt-inducing talk to get the kids to cooperate. Or, perhaps worse, giving up and letting kids having free-reign and ending up as horrible unsufferable me-me-me adults who think the world is there to serve them.

> people in a capacity of authority do the same thing to adults

And let's look at the correlation: countries focused on rehabilitative justice e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway#Histor... tend to have the lowest recidivism.

Meanwhile countries focused on punitive justice (e.g. the US) have high incarceration rates and high recidivism.

That's true, but not really relevant, as this isn't about punitive prison stay (which makes you a worse criminal and gives you no options), but about a number of lashes or some such form of corporal punishment (which instills some shame in citizens having done some offense, but otherwise lets you go free without prison time).

One can e.g. compare Singapore (which does that) vs USA crime rates (the former's being almost non-existant, the latter's being the worst in the developed world), with most other things (like development and infrastructure level, education, per capita income, etc) being very close.

In some rural areas the local prison is a major employer. Gotta keep the economy humming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_co...

How many abusers learned from their parents that it's okay to abuse people to you have authority over?

Some? Kids are also able to learn it by themselves just fine, in a "lord of the flies" like situation.

We're talking about reality.

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