Jordan Riak is the Executive Director of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education, an organization committed to eliminating the use of corporal punishment, especially in schools. His Website includes an article titled Rape: Lesson 1, an account of a woman who was a high-school senior in Florida when she was spanked for excessive tardiness. The spanking occurred while she was wearing a miniskirt. There is also an article analyzing the incident, in which the writer, Tim Field, an author who is evidently British, argues that the administrators who delivered and witnessed the spanking did so to get sexually aroused.
First of all, let me encourage you to check out the articles in question before you read my analysis. Riak's Table of Contents page takes a while to load, so you might want to go directly to the articles in question, then come back here via your back browser or a bookmark and save a little bit of time.
I have a few problems with the analysis of the incident, some of which may be rooted in the differences between British and American educational practices. Let us consider what the victim has done. First, she has come to school late three times. Does she not know the consequences of excessive tardiness (however unreasonable they may be)? (I remember when I was in high school that we were informed even before we registered as freshmen what the consequences of unexcused tardies and absences were.) Second, the victim knows what the punishment is like?that it will be embarrassing and humiliating. She gets sick in the bathroom even before she goes to be spanked. (This seems to answer the first question, doesn?t it?) Why, then, is she wearing a miniskirt? It's not because of any school-uniform rule (which might be the case in Britain); rather, the victim herself says that she has put on the miniskirt because it is hot that day. But if she knows that the penalty for excessive tardiness may include a paddling, and that said paddling will be administered to her buttocks (where else?), why doesn't she wear something other than a miniskirt to school? A lightweight knee-length skirt should work just as well at keeping her cool. Even if she doesn't know before coming to school that the punishment will be administered on this particular day (and assuming the third tardy has occurred on a previous day), it seems she should be smart enough (this is a person planning to go to college, remember) to avoid wearing a miniskirt until after the punishment has been administered.
But let us asume that the victim is late to school on the day that the punishment is given. Are we to believe that one or both administrators say, "Look, Miss Beauty Pageant Contestant has now been late three times, and she's wearing a miniskirt! Let's spank her today!?" The report of the incident asserts that many of the girls in the school have been spanked this way, hence the victim's acute anxiety before the paddling. Have all of them made the mistake of wearing miniskirts to school on the day they were late for the third time? Even if other trivial (and not-so-trivial) infractions (e.g., gum chewing, throwing food in the cafeteria, running in the halls) are deemed to merit corporal punishment, it is hard to see how very many girls could be spanked in miniskirts before they would all choose to wear jeans, slacks, or even longer skirts in order to reduce the risk of humiliation and embarrassment should they have to suffer a paddling.
I think it's more likely that the administrators got a "lucky" break, but highly unlikely that very many girls in the school ever got paddled while wearing miniskirts. No matter how twisted or perverted the paddler and the witness may have been, in a society in which women and girls have a great deal of choice over what kind of clothing to wear, it's hard to imagine two male school administrators being able to count on living out their fantasies of frequently paddling unwilling girls in miniskirts.
©Story Page, 1999
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