Corporal punishment

What is corporal punishment?

Corporal punishment (Dutch: lijfstraf) is a punishment handed out through the body: pain or discomfort as a response to something that happened. Outside BDSM it is a legal and pedagogical concept, and in the Netherlands it is banned on both sides. Within BDSM it is a borrowed form between adults who ask for it together.

What corporal punishment looks like in practice

Something is said first, and only then is something done. That is the whole form.

The common case: two people have a handful of rules, one of them has not been kept, and that is named out loud. What happened, how many it will be, and that the matter is off the table afterward. There is counting. Nobody asks whether it feels good. Six strokes by hand land harder that way than twenty minutes of firm play, because the meaning does the work.

Where the word lijfstraf comes from

From a word that originally meant “life”. Not “body”.

The Etymologiebank records līf as early as the tenth century, in the Wachtendonck Psalms, as “(the) life”. Only afterward does it shift to “body, torso”. The same word is the English life and the German Leib, and in lijfrente (a life annuity) and lijfsbehoud (saving one’s life) that old meaning is still plainly present in Dutch. A lijfstraf was therefore a punishment against your life, one step below the death penalty.

That is how it worked, too. Herman Franke describes in Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift what that looked like here: until halfway through the nineteenth century people were put on display in market squares, flogged and branded. The Criminal Code of 1809 regulated the execution down to the detail, and Franke quotes those articles verbatim: “Het geesselen geschiedt met roeden op den blooten rug van den misdadigen, staande aan een’ paal gebonden, en de armen opgehaald”, and “Het brandmerken wordt verrigt met een heet ijzer op den schouder van den veroordeelden.”

In 1854 that came to an end, though that was mainly a formality: for the tormenting punishments a pardon had as a rule already been granted for some years. The last public execution was in 1860, ten years later the death penalty disappeared from the law, and since then no one here has been physically punished in public again.

The second abolition came a century and a half later and was about the living room. Since 25 April 2007, article 1:247 of the Civil Code contains one sentence that leaves no room: in the care and upbringing of the child, parents apply no mental or physical violence or any other degrading treatment.

Why people ask for corporal punishment

For the closure, almost never for the pain.

What makes corporal punishment unique among everything on this site is that it ends. Trigger, count, done. In daily life that barely exists.

• For the person who undergoes the corporal punishment the gain lies in that closure. Something went wrong, it had a price, and that price was manageable.
• For the person who hands it out it lies in the role: staying consistent without raising your voice. That is usually where this falls apart.
• For two people together a corporal punishment gives a shared finish line to something that otherwise gets talked around for weeks.

Behavior does not change from it. Someone who uses a corporal punishment to truly reshape the other person is parenting, and that is exactly what this form between adults is not.

How people do it in practice

Almost always in the same order. The variation is in the dressing.

There are three recognizable forms. The domestic variant, in which a handful of rules apply all year. The school variant, with roleplay and fitting tools, for which caning lends itself because a cane can be counted. And the standalone punishment scene, with no story around it.

Careful or sloppy does not depend on the severity, but on whether the reason was stated in advance and whether an ending was agreed. Without that ending a corporal punishment does not stop but fades away, and someone is left behind for whom nothing was closed.

Misconceptions about corporal punishment

“Corporal punishment is the same as spanking.” The same movement, a different engine. With spanking the sensation is the goal; a corporal punishment is a response to something. From the outside you can’t see that difference, from the inside everything.

“Because it’s banned, it’s also wrong between adults.” The ban in article 1:247 of the Civil Code is about children in upbringing, and that boundary is not arbitrary. In General Comment No. 8 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child describes corporal punishment as “any punishment in which physical force is used and intended to cause some degree of pain or discomfort, however light”, and asks states to ban it explicitly. What the committee is concerned with is the powerlessness of the person who undergoes it. Two adults who come up with it together and can both step out of it stand in a different relation.

“Corporal punishment has no safeword.” The other way around: that safeword is what separates this form from the committee’s definition.

“The heavier, the.” The strictest corporal punishment I have seen land consisted of twelve strokes and three minutes of talking.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Of all the words here, this is the one people are least quick to say out loud. They ask for “strict”, for “really being dealt with for once”, and what they mean is: give me a reason.

Almost no one wants the corporal punishment itself. They want the moment after, when something has been settled and someone says out loud that it is over. That is why the announcement matters more than the execution. If I leave out that sentence, the scene misses exactly what someone came for.

At home it almost always goes wrong at the same point: it runs on too long. What lingers becomes a mood, and a mood cannot be closed off.

What you can do yourself

• Write down the rules a corporal punishment can follow, with the number attached. Someone who decides the consequence on the spot is improvising a verdict.
• Set down that the safeword also applies during a corporal punishment, and say that out loud. That is exactly where the difference lies with what the UN committee describes.
• Wait until your irritation is gone, and only then take it up. A corporal punishment that comes from anger wrecks in one evening what has been built up.
• Ask a day later whether it really was closed off. A corporal punishment that did not land is one you rarely hear about in the moment itself.

Read more about corporal punishment

For the scene side, the power of shame explains which emotion comes along with it.

Beyond that, Herman Franke’s article is freely readable and by far the best Dutch-language piece on how the scaffold disappeared from this country. And General Comment No. 8 shows how sharply a treaty body now defines the concept.

Where this fits on this site

Want to know how a punishment framework feels without anything being at stake at home? That fits within an arrangement with me. We make the rules for behavior the way you want them, and we build the severity up from nothing. How that is set down in advance is on the BDSM date page.

Sources

• Burgerlijk Wetboek Boek 1, artikel 247. Wetten.overheid.nl, current text. Primary legislation, and therefore the only correct source for the legal status of corporal punishment in Dutch parenting. Provides the second sentence of the second paragraph: “In the care and upbringing of the child, parents apply no mental or physical violence or any other degrading treatment.” That sentence has been there since the amendment that took effect on 25 April 2007.
• General Comment No. 8 (2006): The Right of the Child to Protection from Corporal Punishment and Other Cruel or Degrading Forms of Punishment. UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, document symbol CRC/C/GC/8, adopted at the forty-second session (Geneva, 15 May to 2 June 2006), read here in the text edition of the Human Rights Library of the University of Minnesota. The treaty body responsible for this norm. Provides the definition in paragraph 11: “The Committee defines ‘corporal’ or ‘physical’ punishment as any punishment in which physical force is used and intended to cause some degree of pain or discomfort, however light”, and the finding in paragraph 34 that withdrawing existing justifications is not enough and that an explicit ban in civil or criminal legislation is needed.
• Over beschaving en de afschaffing van het schavot. Herman Franke, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 8(2), 1981. Historical-sociological research based on parliamentary records and nineteenth-century publications, and the only Dutch-language piece that treats this whole trajectory. Provides the finding that until the middle of the nineteenth century people were put on display in market squares, flogged and branded, the point that these punishments were formally imposed until the legal abolition in 1854 while for the tormenting punishments a pardon had as a rule already been granted for some years, the last public execution of three murderers in 1860 with the legal abolition of the death penalty ten years later, and the verbatim execution articles from the Criminal Code about flogging with rods on the bare back at a post and branding with a hot iron on the shoulder.
• lijf. Etymologiebank, hosted by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, with the entry from the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Philippa et al., 2003-2009). Provides the Old Dutch form līf “(the) life” from the tenth century with the Wachtendonck Psalms as the source, the meaning shift to “body, torso”, the Proto-Germanic base form and the cognates Old Saxon līf, Old High German līb (German Leib), Old English līf (English life) and Old Norse líf, plus the fact that the old meaning “life” is preserved in compounds like lijfrente and lijfsbehoud.

Related terms

Corporal punishment is impact play with a reason behind it, and that reason is the only thing that sets it apart from the rest.

• Spanking. The same act without a punishment purpose, the form nearly everyone starts with, and the erotic meaning the English word carries alongside it.
• Discipline. The framework of rules within which a corporal punishment first comes to mean something.
• Caning. The tool that lends itself best to counting, and therefore turns up most often in a punishment framework.
• Funishment. The counterpart: the same form, but with pleasure as the goal and no transgression.
• Corner time. The variant where no one is touched and only time does the work.
• Maintenance spanking. The same act at a fixed moment, precisely without anything having gone wrong, and why the “punishment” in the Dutch name for it is undeserved.
• Plak. The schoolroom object that corporal punishment was handed out with in the Netherlands for centuries, and the word that stayed behind from it.
• Punishment. The word straf in Dutch and what it drags along: a transgression, an authority and someone who did not want it.
• Tawse. The Scottish schoolroom object, and the case in which the European Court ruled on it.