Tawse

What is a tawse?

A tawse (pronounced /tɔːz/) is a thick leather strap with one end cut into tails, until 1987 the punishment tool of the Scottish school. It usually landed there on the palm of the hand, hand tawsing, and sometimes on the buttocks. In BDSM it is an impact tool that arrives broad and dull rather than sharp.

Where the word tawse comes from

From the leather itself. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue lists taw as a noun with the meaning “leather made from skin that has received a minimal amount of processing,” and explicitly refers on to the plural form taw(i)s. So a tawse is literally “the strips of untanned leather,” a name that describes the object and says nothing about the blow. The entry tawse itself cannot be read in the Scots dictionaries at the moment: the digital edition reports an error in the source file there.

How Dutch newspapers described the tawse

The clearest Dutch account is in the Limburgs Dagblad of 19 January 1976, when British headmasters quarreled over the caning of girls. The tawse, the paper wrote, “is a leather band about 35 cm long and 5 cm wide, the top part cut into strips like the fingers of a hand,” and anyone who takes it expertly on trousers or hand feels it for days. The same piece carries the number that brings the use into view: at one school in Walsall the tawse had been applied more than five hundred times since 1973, on children aged seven to nineteen. The local alderman for education defended that number with the argument that the strap came naturally to Walsall, because the town had always had strong ties to the leather industry.

What the European Court said about the tawse

Something different from what people think. In Campbell and Cosans v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 25 February 1982, two Scottish mothers complained about exactly this object. Neither child had ever been struck with it. The Court ruled unanimously that there was no breach of Article 3: the threat alone did not reach the threshold of inhuman or degrading treatment. What the Court did find, by six votes to one, was a breach of Article 2 of the First Protocol. The state must respect the philosophical convictions of parents. So the tawse did not fall because it was found cruel, but because parents were allowed to object to it. The real abolition came five years later: an order from March 1987 brought Articles 47 and 48 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 into force on 15 August 1987, with Article 48 expressly for Scotland.

Where this fits on this site

A tawse I rarely use, and when I do pick it up, it is for what it does not do: it does not cut. If you want to know how such an object feels next to a hand or a paddle, that is one of the things we go over beforehand. How such an evening runs is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Case of Campbell and Cosans v. the United Kingdom. European Court of Human Rights, Chamber, applications 7511/76 and 7743/76, judgment Strasbourg 25 February 1982; full pdf read. Provides the description in paragraph 13 that corporal punishment at the two schools involved consisted of “striking the palm of the pupil’s hand with a leather strap called a tawse”; paragraph 25, that neither child was actually struck; and the operative part: unanimously no breach of Article 3, by six votes to one a breach of the second sentence of Article 2 of the First Protocol toward both mothers and of the first sentence toward Jeffrey Cosans.
• The Education (No. 2) Act 1986 (Commencement No. 2) Order 1987. Statutory Instrument 1987 No. 344 (C.8), made 2 March 1987, United Kingdom. Provides from Schedule 1 that Article 47 (“Abolition of corporal punishment”) and Article 48 (“Abolition of corporal punishment: Scotland”) of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 came into force on 15 August 1987.
• “Alleen op de hand”. Limburgs Dagblad, 19 January 1976, via the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. OCR read word for word; three days later the same reporting appeared, shortened, in a northern paper. Provides the Dutch description of the object (35 by 5 centimeters, the top cut into strips), the fact that one school in Walsall had used the tawse more than five hundred times since 1973 on children aged seven to nineteen, and the local education alderman’s defense that the town simply had a leather industry. A newspaper report is used here as a picture of the time and as description, not as a safety statement.
• Tawse. Wikipedia. Independently confirms the etymology (“the plural of Scots taw, a thong of a whip”), the build (“one end split into one or more prongs”), the use on both the buttocks and the palm (the latter is called hand tawsing), and the English towns where the school implement was in use outside Scotland: Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, Liverpool, Manchester, and Walsall. The same towns the Dutch newspaper report of 1976 names. Written by volunteers; used here for terminology and spread, not for a safety statement.
• Taw, n.2. Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue via the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, volume X, 2001. Provides the meaning “leather made from skin that has received a minimal amount of processing in its preservation” and the cross-reference to the plural form Taw(i)s. The actual entry tawse in the Scottish National Dictionary is not accessible: the website reports an error in the source file there.

Related terms

A tawse is a tool within impact play, the page that says what striking with an object does to a body.

• Plak. The Dutch school implement with the same career, and the word that stuck in Dutch.
• Corporal punishment. The frame the tawse spent its whole history within.
• Paddle. The other flat object, which lands on the buttocks instead of the hand.
• Martinet. The French counterpart with many more, much thinner tails.
• Riding whip. The object where the difference between dull and cutting comes out sharpest.