‘Where do you draw the line?’ : A study about how South African social workers understand their professional role when working with caregivers who use child corporal punishment.

Abstract: Globally, there is an ongoing debate whether child corporal punishment should be banned or not in the home environment. While several countries have banned it already, South Africa is currently in a process of change. Research indicates that child corporal punishment is commonly used in South Africa and that social workers opinions on child corporal punishment seems to be formed by their personal experiences, which affects their assessments. Furthermore, according to research legal reforms are not enough to change a society’s attitudes and norms about child corporal punishment. There is a need of campaigns and leadership. The aim of this study was to comprehend how eight South African social workers described that they understood their professional role, when they worked with caregivers who used child corporal punishment. The informants worked, at the time of the interviews, at different workplaces in Cape Town and had experiences in their professional role of meeting caregivers who used child corporal punishment. Social constructionism was used as the theory of science. The study uses theories by Burr, Gergen and Gergen and Foucault to analyse the impacts of language and discourse in the social workers’ understandings. The empirical material was analysed with qualitative content analysis. We found four themes where all except the first one, are divided into two sub-themes. The first theme is ‘How could corporal punishment be defined?’. Followed by ‘Opinions about corporal punishment’ with the sub-themes: ‘We need one standard to protect our children’ and ‘Corporal punishment should be allowed if it is not abusive’. ‘The roles of the social worker’ is the third theme, divided into the two sub-themes: ‘Social workers and the law’ and ‘The opportunity to make a change’. The last theme is Challenges the social worker face, divided into the sub-themes ‘Corporal punishment rooted in a violent society’ and ‘Corporal punishment in a cultural society’. The results of the study indicate that most of the social workers understood their role, when they worked with caregivers who use child corporal punishment, was to educate by presenting other alternatives than corporal punishment. However, when exploring definitions, opinions, challenges and abilities they sometimes had quite different understandings to one another. Child corporal punishment would be defined both as equivalent as well as separated from abuse, creating confusion to where a line should be drawn. The caregivers’ rights to use corporal punishment would be compared to the children’s rights to be protected from it. Laws regarding child corporal punishment was both present and nonexistent in described assessments. The social workers action space varied greatly. They expressed the need to balance different aspects in the assessment and decide where to draw the line between them. Most of the informants, understood themselves as powerful to bring about change concerning the use of child corporal punishment in the specific families. However, they highlighted the challenges with South Africa’s history and general accepting of child corporal punishment.