The endorsement of these influences creates the right upon parents with their duty to raise their children to become knowledgeable, dependable, and active members of society. Regardless of the fact that child abuse has been scrutinized as a foremost social problem for the last two decades, a single acknowledged and tolerable definition simply does not exist. The mother who hits her child with a belt may be admired as a good parent in one neighborhood; while in another, the mother who slaps her child's face may menace being accounted as an obnoxious parent. (Straus, Gelles & Steinmetz, 1980).
United States corporal punishment has always been the usual choice in disciplining children and youth ever since the colonial times. Only during the past 20 years has there been an outcry on bringing to a halt the practice of corporal punishment in school to children. From the time of the seventeenth century, within the Western world, adults committing corporal punishment with children have decreased. Most of the decreases were the intense types of physical abuse but the less hurtful violence which is still considered as corporal punishment continued (Andero & Stewart 2002).
Those who declare the civil liberties doctrine encompass a very apparent initiative of why corporal punishment in schools is a civil liberties issue and why such punishment should be abolished from our educational system. Their opposition centers on two essential violations of constitutional rights which are imbedded in the practice of corporal punishment. These are the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment's protection of both substantive and bureaucratic due process. With the acceptance of this civil liberties position pivots on acceptance of changes in the condition of children in the society. The point has long conceded where children are subject only to the control of their parents, a relic of a smaller, less complex society in which government cooperates in a less influential role.