ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how corporal punishment—the disciplining of unruly, mainly male, school students by hitting them on certain approved zones of the body with a cane or strap—became a hot topic of public debate in Australia during the 1980s. This was the last decade in which the practice was not only legal but also apparently routine and widely accepted in Australia. The chapter documents some of the activities of a grassroots community group called Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE), established in the late 1970s, which campaigned to raise public awareness about the wrongness of corporal punishment. Amongst the group's activities was successfully lobbying the nascent Australian federal human rights bureaucracy (the Human Rights Commission) to produce a public discussion paper on the issue in 1983. The chapter considers how this long-accepted violent bodily practice could, at this historical moment, animate public interest in how schools operated, and challenge the idea that schools were little worlds, sealed off from the outside.
