Hon. Mary Jane McCallum: Honourable senators, first of all, I would like to thank Senator Kutcher for bringing this bill forward.

This has been triggering for me, and that is the most important time to speak: when your voice shakes.

Do not withhold discipline from your children; if you beat them with a rod, they will not die.

If you beat them with the rod, you will save their lives from Sheol.

That is from Proverbs 23:13-14.

The little girl of eight years old looked at her white blouse where a spot of blood had dropped from her bleeding nose. She hoped that her look of disbelief and astonishment of where the blood came from — and how it could be on her shirt — would forestall what she knew was to come. Of course, she would be blamed for the accident. She couldn’t have known she was going to have a nosebleed. She was hit with a closed fist on her back between her shoulder blades. She was a thin girl, and the fist easily found her bones. She started to cry from pain, from fear and from shame.

She was told, “Stop crying, stop crying,” with every hit of the closed fist. She knew she had to stop if she hoped the beating would stop. And for many years, it was difficult for me to cry.

Honourable senators, the following information that I share is taken from a piece entitled “I Was Spanked and I’m OK: Examining Thirty Years of Research Evidence on Corporal Punishment” by Joan E. Durrant. When we look at the advocacy and research done around the safety provided by seat belt legislation, we made that change to ensure that we no longer placed our children at undue risk. Systematic research across different countries found that seat belts reduced the risk of injuries and fatalities to drivers and occupants, which led to mandating the use of seat belts in cars. Public education campaigns accompanied these legal changes to raise public awareness of the risk.

Today, very few of us would say, “I survived without a seat belt so my child will too.”

By 2020, there were more than 100 studies on corporal punishment. They consistently show that corporal punishment places children at risk, and not one study has shown corporal punishment to have positive, long-term impacts. Corporal punishment does not promote the healthy, long-term outcomes that most parents hope to nurture, and it places children’s developmental health at risk.

Colleagues, what follows is the research on three developmental outcomes: prosocial behaviour, non-violent conflict resolution and positive mental health.

Prosocial behaviour, such as helping, sharing, co-operating and comforting, benefit others. When intrinsically motivated, these behaviours reflect empathy, altruism and compassion for others. They are key indicators that predict successful adolescent development. Prosocial development is fostered through the attachment between the child and at least one caregiver. The child learns to trust and rely upon the caregiver for support. By the age of two, the child exhibits rudimentary prosocial behaviours. Their concern for others becomes visible in their facial expressions, in their voices and sometimes in their behaviours.

Children’s capacities for behaving positively in the social world emerge from positive experiences in close relationships within the family. As children grow and inevitably act in ways that hurt others, effective parents use those opportunities to draw attention to the impacts of the child’s actions on the other person. In psychological terms, this is known as “induction,” which entails providing an explanation that helps children understand the effects of their behaviour on others.

Induction promotes internalization of values because it facilitates the child’s deep processing of their parents’ message.

What is the impact of corporal punishment on prosocial development? Parental responses that arouse stress, anxiety or fear interfere with internalization because the child’s capacity to process their parents’ message becomes impaired. The child instinctively concentrates on dealing with the perceived threat.

Punitive, threatening or painful parental and, in my case, institutional responses also undermine attachment, which is critical to moral learning. With sustained negative parenting, the child’s learning is impeded — and moral development becomes replaced by hostility and resentment.

Honourable senators, in her 2002 research on corporal punishment, Elizabeth Gershoff concluded that:

. . . corporal punishment can impel children to avoid misbehaviors in order to avoid future punishment but cannot on its own teach children the responsibility to behave independently in morally and socially acceptable ways.

Bernadette Saunders’ studies on children in Australia — these are children who were in residential school — found that children tended to experience corporal punishment as humiliating, intimidating, frightening and damaging. The children spoke of feeling powerless, vulnerable, helpless, unjustly treated and of wanting to avoid those parents or institutions.

Now imagine, colleagues, if you lived in residential school and you had no supports to counteract the negative and violent ways you were raised by complete strangers for simply demonstrating innocent, childlike behaviours. Children and adolescents were indeed powerless, vulnerable, helpless and unjustly treated by church representatives and teachers with no recourse to fairness or ability to be heard. Many learned to shut down and become invisible, which negatively impacted communication skills.

Honourable senators, another attribute that most parents hope to cultivate in their children is non-violent conflict resolution. Social scientists referred to one’s ability to read others’ emotions and use that information to guide actions, inhibiting aggressive impulses and regulating anger as emotional intelligence.

And how is this non-violent conflict resolution postured? Emotional competence depends upon the ability to recognize, identify, monitor and regulate one’s emotions rather than denying, suppressing or controlling them. These abilities grow out of a secure parent-child attachment in which children feel safe expressing their emotions and parents respond sensitively and supportively. When parents help their children connect their emotions to their growing reasoning capacities, neural pathways are formed that will become increasingly strong if they are repeatedly activated.

What is the impact of corporal punishment? When children are physically punished, they are placed in a situation where they are unable to express their emotions. They are stripped of their voice and their power of expression. Corporal punishment ends the conversation, discouraging and suppressing the child’s emotional expression. What the child learns is simply how to impose one’s will upon another person.

Every study conducted on the relationship between corporal punishment and aggression has found that corporal punishment predicts higher levels of aggression among children and youth. The aggression may be physical, verbal, relational, instrumental — whether it is intentional and planned or impulsive and reactive — direct or subtle. This aggression may be directed towards siblings, parents, peers or intimate partners or carried out in person through social groups or social media.

Longitudinal studies following a group of children over a number of years found that corporal punishment increases children’s aggression over time and has an increasingly powerful effect on anti-social behaviour as children get older.

Imagine the students in residential school who have been taught that aggression and violence are normal in relationships. Do you wonder why this engrained violence lands many Indigenous people in the prison system today? If you were taught throughout your formative years that violence in its many forms was acceptable, role modelled by nuns and priests, isn’t that what you would then role model to your children and they to theirs? This is what we call intergenerational trauma.

Honourable senators, positive mental health is an overall feeling of satisfaction with life, the capacity to enhance our enjoyment of life and a belief that we can deal with challenges as they appear. When we face adversity, we can continue moving forward if we believe that we have agency — the ability, power and efficacy — to overcome obstacles and take new directions in life. This is a part of self-determination. It was self-determination that was removed from us systematically in residential school.

Some central concepts in mental health research are coping and resilience. Coping is the capacity to manage the stress of adversity, obstacles and potential failure. Resilience is the capacity to move through and surmount adversity, processing its pain and moving forward into life.

How is positive mental health fostered? Positive mental health is developed within interpersonal relationships. A critical component is the belief that one can have an impact, elicit a response and effect change. This belief begins to form in infancy when parents respond to their baby’s cries and meet their baby’s physical and emotional needs. This is the beginning of a sense of efficacy, self-confidence and self-worth. With parents’ help, their toddlers learn and practise self-regulation within a secure and trusting relationship, as young children come to learn that they can tolerate and even master frustration and solve problems.

What is the impact of corporal punishment on mental health? The prerogative to strike is solely the parent’s. The child’s role is to submit to the punishment. This contributes to a loss of agency. The more these experiences are repeated over many years, the more powerless the child feels. This can lead to learned helplessness, a state in which the child comes to believe that they have no control over outcomes. This belief can manifest itself in anxiety, addictions, suicidal tendencies and other difficulties indicative of compromised mental health.

When I left residential school, I believed I had no agency over my life, and that is what places many of the missing and murdered women at high-risk.

In the book Decolonizing Discipline, edited by Valerie Michaelson and Joan Durrant, the editors state:

Based on British common law allowing corporal punishment “to correct what is evil in the child,” the text of Section 43 justifies the use of corporal punishment by parents and those standing in the place of parents. It has been used to defend the assault of children in homes and schools for more than a century and allowed those operating the residential schools to inflict violence on children with impunity.

Honourable senators, today we know that corporal punishment poses dangers to children’s emotional and overall development. We also know that section 43 has permitted gross physical punishment in the past. If we know that discipline is really about teaching and guidance and that we can promote children’s health and development more effectively without corporal punishment, why would we want to continue to permit it or allow children to be placed in such a vulnerable position?

Colleagues, even after section 43 of the Criminal Code is hopefully repealed, unless the underlying narratives that enable the rationalization of abuse against children are addressed, children will still be vulnerable to other manifestations of these same narrow, theological frameworks that justify the power and control of one group over another. Society needs to confront the ways that these very colonial systems that have helped to shape this country continue to enable various oppressions to this day.

Honourable senators, I urge you to support the swift passage of Bill S-251 and, by doing so, stand in support of the defenceless and vulnerable children who will greatly benefit from the progress that this bill will bring about. Kinanâskomitin.