Joshua Terrell was 8-years-old when he decided to kill himself. He was too small, though, to aim his family shotgun with precision. His parents, moreover, had never let him know where they stored the shotgun shells, a precaution that may have saved his life.

That was some years ago, when Terrell was a third grader living in Crosby, Texas. Talking with another reporter and me at the time, he gave a surprising reason for wanting to die: He'd been paddled at school.

One day, he recalls, for horseplay and talking in class, the vice principal hit him twice with a board, leaving a large purple bruise on his bottom. "At first I wanted to break every window in the school," he says. But then he turned the anger on himself. "I thought if I killed myself, then at least I wouldn't have to go back to school," he says, staring at the tops of his sneakers. "For three weeks that's all I could think about."

Terrell planned his suicide in eerie detail. He had decided either to hang himself from his living room balcony with a jump rope or fire the shotgun into his mouth -- "if I could reach the trigger and do it in the woods, so I wouldn't mess up the house." When he revealed his plans to several classmates, a teacher overheard. An alarmed counselor notified his parents. The Terrells took him to a therapist, who confirmed that their son was extremely depressed and needed treatment.

Suicide is rare among children under fifteen, and in fact there have been few formal studies to document whether children can be so traumatized by corporal punishment that they become suicidal. But Joshua's suicidal feelings after being paddled at school have a familiar ring to parents and corporal punishment researchers. Over the past 15 years, they have identified dozens of children across the country who have attempted or threatened suicide after repeated classroom paddlings.

"The child thinks, 'If the school thinks I'm worthless, then I must be worthless,'" said the psychologist Irwin Hyman, who directed the National Center for the Study of Corporal Punishment, at Temple University in Philadelphia in an interview before his death in 2004. "School paddlings may cause feelings of low self-esteem and helplessness, which are part of being depressed. And unfortunately, severe depression and hopelessness can be a precursor to suicidal feelings."

Over the past 20 years, Hyman said, he has studied hundreds of corporal punishment cases nationwide. He has interviewed dozens of children so disturbed by corporal punishment that they suffer from nightmares, depression, and other symptoms like those of some Vietnam veterans. Most of these children are not necessarily suicidal, he said, but suffer depression that, if left untreated, could lead to self-destructive behavior later on.

In the last 15 years, in fact, studies by psychologists have linked corporal punishment at home and in school with increased aggression, vandalism, and juvenile delinquency, and have suggested links with depression and lowered self-esteem. Research by sociology professor Murray Strauss, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, found that the more times adults were hit or spanked as young teenagers, the more likely they were to be depressed and to think about committing suicide.

"With so much evidence that nothing is worse for a child's self-esteem than this type of violent punishment, one wonders how in the world schools in this nation can even consider tolerating corporal punishment," says Charlotte Ross, former head of the Youth Suicide National Center. "It's ironic, because our schools are deluged with reams of literature talking about how to maintain children's self-esteem -- and then we undo everything by this violence."

Each year about 272,000 students receive some kind of corporal punishment, according to the US Department of Education. The practice remains legal in 22 states, where, as a means of discipline, children from five to 18 are paddled, spanked, whipped, even tied to chairs. In rare instances children have been struck with baseball bats and stung with electric cattle prods, according to newspaper reports.

Many school administrators insist that paddling is a disciplinary last resort, but surveys have shown that most corporal punishment is for minor offenses such as talking. Bruises from school beatings are sometimes so severe that parents have taken their children to emergency rooms for treatment. Records from hospitals around the country show that injuries are not confined to bruises and welts, but on rare occasions have included broken bones, gashes, sprains, and concussions.

Teachers and administrators who support corporal punishment dismiss such injuries as aberrations. They say paddling is an essential tool for keeping classroom order. "The beauty of corporal punishment is that kids can take their punishment and then forget about it," one fourth-grade teacher in Texas insisted.

But over the past 15 years, school paddlings have been increasingly criticized by organizations of parents and child advocates, who have helped convince many other states to drop the practice. Organizations opposing school paddlings include the national PTA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the National Child Abuse Coalition. Calling school paddlings "legalized child abuse," they point out that corporal punishment is banned in the public schools of almost every other developed country.

In this country, the South is corporal punishment's stronghold. Within that region are the five states with the highest number of students hit in public schools -- Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee. Texas, according to government records, reports the most paddlings -- an estimated 50,000 a year. And it was Texas where the news of paddled schoolchildren who turned suicidal first came to light, not from news accounts but through the efforts of a group of concerned parents and teachers.

Former teacher Jimmy Dunne, who directs People Opposed to Paddling Students in Houston, argues that few people realize how severe many school paddlings really are. "They're not usually like spankings -- they're beatings," Dunne says. "I mean we have had teachers in East Texas who shave down baseball bats and swing with both hands." Over the last 12 years, he has logged a number of reports from distraught parents who said their children wanted to kill themselves because they were beaten at school.

Among these parents was Joe De La Cerda of Galveston, Texas. His son Joey, now in his early twenties, was 11 at the time he began talking about suicide. His father says he had became despondent after being paddled regularly in the first through third grades. "My son had a very poor outlook on life," says De La Cerda. "He talked about suicide a lot of times, about running in front of a school bus or onto the freeway to get away from everything."

Seven-year-old Brian Arwood of Madison, Tennessee, felt a similar desperation. Brian's parents had asked the school not to spank or paddle their son, explaining that he was hyperactive and recovering from abuse by a babysitter. They later learned, however, that his first-grade teacher had paddled him more than 15 times for talking, drawing pictures at the wrong time, and other infractions. During this time Brian drew picture after picture of monsters, people hanging from trees, and other images suggesting a preoccupation with death.

One morning, furious over a paddling he'd just received, Brian climbed to the top of a 10-foot-high circular slide, tied one end of a jump rope around his neck, and secured the other to the steel handholds. He remembers feeling "nothing inside" as he pushed off. The rope jerked him backward off the slide and left him swinging three feet off the ground.

Interviewed at the time, Brian recalls clawing at the rope around his neck as he swung into the air. "I was real scared then and trying to scream for help. The rope was smooshing all the air out of me. I could see all the kids underneath me, staring, circling and circling like lions in a cage. Jamie and another boy were trying to push me back up, and it seemed like it took forever for a teacher to get over to me."

Brian's mother Connie and her husband believe that their son, now a teenager, didn't actually want to die. "It was a cry for help," she says, "so we would finally listen to him when he talked about school."

Children like Brian -- who suffer from hyperactivity or other learning disabilities -- may be particularly vulnerable to trauma at school. In a three-year study of suicides among children under 15, researchers at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center found that half the teenagers who took their own lives had been diagnosed previously as having learning disabilities. In addition, special needs kids, along with African Americans and boys in general, are the most likely to be beaten by teachers.

Sometimes these children conceal the source of their hurt. In the late 1980s, 10-year-old David Turpin of Dayton, Texas, who was diagnosed with both dyslexia and a type of learning disability called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder waited for months to tell his parents of the near-daily paddlings he received for not completing his schoolwork. "We had no idea he was getting paddled regularly at school," says Debra Turpin, who had informed his teachers that her son had learning disorders and asked them not to hit him -- ever. "We were telling him, 'It's okay now, son. The teachers understand and we understand." But he had quit doing schoolwork, was eating compulsively and crying all the time, getting more and more frustrated. Finally he broke down and said, 'I'm so stupid I just ought to kill myself.' That's when we went into action." David spent three months in a psychiatric hospital, at a cost of $80,000, before the doctors felt it was safe to release him.

Educators who agree that corporal punishment is a form of child abuse may see particular cause for concern in federal research. One national report on youth suicide contains a study by psychiatrist Felton Earls and sociologist Lee Robins at the University of Washington Medical School in St. Louis. Analyzing interviews with 2,700 teenagers attending free clinics in ten states, they found that four percent had attempted suicide in the past year. These suicidal children were much more likely than others to have been threatened or assaulted.

Another study, led by Eva Deykin of the Harvard School of Public Health, compared teenagers hospitalized for attempted suicide with teenagers hospitalized for other reasons. The finding: Suicidal teenagers were up to four times more likely to have been seen by the state agency that investigates child abuse.

Still other research, published in 1995 in the journal Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, found that corporal punishment by parents was the strongest factor contributing to depression among teenagers living in or near public housing.

Although only the latter looked at corporal punishment, the studies suggest that physical pain inflicted by adults may be among the traumas that increase children's risk of depression and suicide.

Even in the face of such research, however, some adults bent on physical punishment continue to act as if children are somehow immune to extreme pain and anguish. Says psychologist Israel Orbach in his 1988 book, Children Who Don't Want to Live, "Many still find it hard to believe that children as young as five or six can sincerely wish to die -- and that some actually do commit suicide... It is commonly but mistakenly believed that children do not comprehend the meaning of death. In most cases, it is exactly because children do understand the meaning of death that they wish to die."

-- Diana Hembree is the executive editor of Consumer Health Interactive. An earlier version of this piece appeared in Hippocrates magazine. Rob Waters contributed to this report.

References

First published June 12, 2001
Last updated February 26, 2008
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive