ABSTRACT
Usually ‘disciplinary violence between parents and children’ turned up in court not as complaints as such – although that did sometimes take place – but rather as circumstantial evidence in other cases. For example, there is a case when a woman is accused of fornication and the accuser claims that her mother must have seen her in the act, because the mother slapped her on the face.23 The violent act in these cases is mentioned very briefly, with no special emotion or value specifically attached to it. In these cases violence was presented as an appropriate response to a certain situation, so much so that it could be used as a kind of evidence that the situation had occurred. At the same time, even ‘appropriate use of violence’ was never talked of casually: violent acts and talking about them were deeply significant and meaningful in the testimonies and in the court of law: they were possible evidence of something else. Violence as a rhetorical tool or possible evidence of another crime only appeared in the long records of lower court hearings: the Court of Appeal no longer recorded them as evidence and apparently did not discuss the stories.
