I lived in the New York City area for most of my childhood. My whole family going back a few generations have all received Catholic education (and we're still Catholic.) Perhaps I could be of some assistance on the subject.
Nowadays, what Brother Constance meted out as punishment is considered an abomination and no school in New York or New Jersey (across the Hudson River) allows it. New York abolished the practice of corporal punishment in 1985, but as far as I remember, the actual practice began to die out much earlier, starting around 1970. If Brother Constance tried what he did in the film today in 2009, it is very likely he would have been taken away in handcuffs: In between 1965 and 1985, there were scandals involving teachers who put kids in the hospital with broken bones and severe injuries both in Catholic schools and public schools. It took children with concussions to bring parents to their senses that there is a fine line between discipline and all out cruelty, assault.
Unfortunately, when my father was a teenager (he was almost the same age as the boys in this film) no such law was in place, and the orders who ran the schools had a reputation to be learned men and women of the cloth: you have to remember that in America becoming a priest or a nun had been, for a very long time, a path to education. Also, for a very, very long time, these nuns and priests would often be the only people in immigrant communities with any education, sometimes the only ones that could read (this encompassed the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, some Germans, etc.) Such conditions gave the priests and nuns an inordinate amount of power over their charges and the families. (My father's family emigrated from Tourmakeady via London c. 1920. My great-grandfather was only fourteen years old when his schooling stopped because he was one of nine kids, and he had to go to London to work the docks with his father and brothers to support the family. He saw the Church as a means to take care of his family and later, in America, ensure that they had opportunities he could only dream of when he was a boy, like getting an education that in his mind was only reserved for Protestants of a much higher caste.) The trust my grandparents and great-grandparents placed in the nuns and priests was rarely questioned, so men like Brother Constance could take advantage of what were usually honest, good intentions to better one's lot in life and rule with an iron fist.
The reason that Brother Thaddeus did not punish Constance any farther than what he did was because technically there was no crime committed. He was not obligated to go to the police. He certainly could not keep Constance at St. Basil's and he did not have the authority to throw Constance out of the order (only the pope can do this but back then defrocking was very, very rare.) His students could not expect much better treatment if they went to a plain, publicly funded school and they would be disconnected from the Church. The best Thaddeus could do was ask for Constance's reassignment to a place where there were no children and warn the higher ups that Constance, basically, made Beelzebub look like Hannah Montana. (Obviously the same strategy backfired in cases of molestation, which pretty much has always been very, very, very, ILLEGAL and the men who shifted around the perverts should have absolutely called the police.)
Otherwise, in America, corporal punishment like this is rare and has been declining for years. It is still on the books in most of the South and in border states (and most often done there.) However, my cousins got most of their educations in Texas and Arizona: my 16 year old cousin Sam at worst has to do laps around the field in the blistering heat if he behaves badly in gym class, and out West that is enough punishment! Other parts of the South still have it but mostly Christian fundamentalist schools use it (this amounts to 5% or less of the total school age population in each state; the Bible Belt may be much more conservative than the rest of the nation but most parents aren't so trusting as to blindly allow teachers to behave like the Trunchbull.) If you want to see what real corporal abuse looks like, look to South Korea or parts of Japan: it is frightening.
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jeffster67
14 years ago
Or even worse yet Singapore...remember Michael Fay, the American kid from Ohio who vandalized cars in Singapore in the early 1990's and got a few whacks on the bare fanny with a wet rattan cane from a martial arts expert? I wonder if there might be YouTube video footage of this, but probably not...but there is a video clip of a young (high school aged?) boy being caned in front of his whole class (fully clothed) for bringing pornographic material to school.
"I'd be very happy to be myself if I could remember who I am. Who am I?"
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sonofbeach-sheet
10 years ago
That caning of the young boy being caned in school is no comparison to judicial caning. Judicial caning rips your bare butt to shreds leaving weals of blood pulp for weeks and once you can sit down again, you're still somewhat crippled for life.
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