No fewer than 22 young women who’ve attended Kennett High in MO are signed up to the Facebook  page to confess that “I Got A Paddling At School”. Here are a couple of extracts from the school’s policy manual which discuss the disciplinary regime there in more detail:

STUDENT DISCIPLINE

It is essential that the district maintain a classroom environment that allows teachers to communicate effectively with all students in the class and allows all students in the class to learn. To assist district staff in maintaining the necessary classroom environment, the Board of Education has created a discipline code that addresses the consequences, including suspension or expulsion, for students whose conduct is prejudicial to good order and discipline in the schools or impairs the morale or good conduct of other students…

These policies, regulations and procedures will apply to all students in attendance in district instructional and support programs as well as at school-sponsored activities. All district staff are required to enforce these policies, regulations and procedures in a manner that is fair and developmentally appropriate and that considers the student and the individual circumstances involved. Off-campus misconduct that adversely affects the educational climate will also be subject to these policies, regulations and procedures…

A copy of the district’s comprehensive discipline policy will be provided to every student and parent or guardian of every student at the beginning of each school year and will be available in the superintendent’s office during normal business hours.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

Corporal punishment, as a disciplinary measure, is permitted at all grade levels for correction, maintaining discipline and order, protection of property and/or for providing for the health, safety and general welfare of students, staff members, parents and patrons. If utilized, it should be used in accordance with student discipline policy JG-R, and administered only by a certificated staff member. Corporal punishment should not be utilized in the presence of other students, nor without a witness who is a certificated staff member.

Corporal punishment shall be administered only by swatting the buttocks with a paddle in a reasonable manner. The respective certificated staff member who administered the corporal punishment shall submit to the building principal a copy of the student misconduct report which reflects information regarding the student’s misconduct and applicable information regarding the administration of the corporal punishment. The building principal shall forward a copy of the report to the superintendent.

From Shobhaa Dee, an Indian blogger, on 13 June:

Reading the account and watching the television clips revived long buried memories of being frequently caned myself as a school girl. This was the punishment reserved for students who were considered ‘rebellious’ and ‘disobedient’. Of course , I was both… and worse.

But to be so severely punished for those ‘failings’ by the ogre of a school principal – a towering woman representing a Scottish mission ? I often went home with swollen , angry red welts… that made me feel so ashamed, I hid them from my parents

[I can now] retell and relive those hellish minutes when I’d be summoned to the Principal’s office after standing on the yellow bench for hours, often without food or water… The old era of adopting the so-called traditional ‘cane and able’ modus operandi to make errant kids toe the line are over…

From the Qatar courts, reported in Gulf Times on 9 June:

An Indonesian housemaid has been sentenced to 100 lashes following her conviction of maintaining illicit relations with her sponsor’s friend who had left the country for good before the matter came to the fore.

The 41-year-old Egyptian lover, who was tried in absentia, was sentenced to a year imprisonment and a technical subsequent deportation. A Doha court of first instance heard that the affair came to the light when the maid was admitted to the hospital for a health problem and was found to be five months pregnant in September 2009.

The maid told the police that she had allowed a friend of her sponsor access to the house “once” in May 2009. According to court documents, the woman (24) confessed to illicit relations in the court as well.

Reported at Sankaku Complex on 6 June:

A couple who decided to engage in kinky BDSM sex now face prosecution after police decided to file charges of aggravated assault against the man, despite both parties consenting.

The couple, a 32-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl (the age of consent in Sweden is 15), met on a Swedish sex website and struck up a steamy BDSM-based relationship.

The girl, apparently the masochist of the pair, wrote in a letter that she wanted to be “used, abused and thoroughly humiliated,” and her sadistic partner was only too happy to oblige, locking her into a cage and applying nipple clamps, amongst other acts.

However, a relative of the girl noticed bruises left over from their play, and police soon stuck their nose in with a view to arresting the man.

The public prosecutor is outraged at the consenting couple’s dungeon antics, conceding that whilst she cannot charge the man with rape due to the consenting nature of their sex, she can still charge him with aggravated assault whether both parties consented or not:

“What I want to establish is that even if they say they are in agreement over this then you not allowed to seriously assault someone. It is on this issue that the district court has to issue a ruling, is this aggravated assault and was she able to agree to it?”

Sweden apparently allows consenting parties to beat each other’s brains out if they do so in the ring, as with boxing or similar, but it may very well not be permissible to engage in rough sex or BDSM play, consent or no.

The defendant is said to be calling an expert in sadomasochism to testify on his behalf, in a case which could soon be giving police in less radical nations ideas about how to finally get rid of their unwanted perverts without falling foul of tedious arguments over civil liberties – simply accuse them of violence against women.

Leftist gender politics appear to have come full circle – once intended to free women from traditional restrictions, advocates of such politics now use them to restrict and control others, imposing censorship and anti-sex laws in the name of protecting women and girls from male bestiality. Indeed, feminism is now ironically proving far more effective than traditional religious concerns in imposing moralist laws on the public – few things are now considered more harmful than something potentially injurious to the rights of women.

The New York Times on 30 May picked up on a story we’d first featured here back in May, including a video of the whipping that’s just been released:

The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.

Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands. Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not theTaliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.

Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.

The ordeal of Afghanistan’s child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively…

The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so. Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.

Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.

After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission’s report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.

In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.

The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present. The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.

“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent. When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.

The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high. “Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.

On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.

Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13. Her husband’s family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me…”

From the Daily Star of 25 May, quoted on South Asian Rights:

The High Court yesterday directed the deputy commissioner of Brahmanbaria to turn in within a week a probe report on a fatwa (religious edict) against a 17-year-old girl. The girl from Banchharampur upazila was given 101 lashes on May 19 as a punishment for having an affair.

The court ordered the superintendent of police (SP) of Brahmanbaria and the officer-in-charge (OC) of Banchharampur Police Station to produce the victim with her guardian before it on June 2. It asked the media not to publish the name or photo of the girl or show any footage.

An HC bench of justices Syed Mahmud Hossain and Gobinda Chandra Tagore issued a ruling on the government to explain in a week why extra-judicial punishments in the name of Islamic Sharia law or fatwa should not be declared illegal.

Online newspaper BD24 added the detail that the “girl was reportedly caned”.