More Arguments for the Weakness of the Empirical Evidence Used to Support Spanking Bans: Rejoinder to Afifi et al. (2025) and Kraus de Camargo (2025)

J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2025 Aug;34(2):7-11. Epub 2025 Aug 1.

ABSTRACT

In this rejoinder we address 13 concerns elicited by our invited commentary “An update on the scientific evidence for and against the legal banning of disciplinary spanking.” In addition to defending assertions made in the initial commentary, we make several new substantive arguments. In response to dissenters’ equating of non-experimental evidence against spanking with non-experimental evidence against smoking, we demonstrate that the two are very dissimilar. We question the purpose of spanking bans, providing stronger evidence that they do not seem to prevent child abuse. We review Canada’s association with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) before and after the 2006 classification of all physical punishment as violence. We discuss the disciplining of children with disabilities. We encourage fellow researchers to avoid the scholar-advocacy bias, appropriately discriminating methodological evaluations of empirical evidence from personal convictions.

PMID:40969678 | PMC:PMC12442254