The question of how far the law should intervene in family life to protect children’s rights is controversial. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the primary responsibility of parents for their children and the value to children of being brought up in a family that nurtures and protects them. Nevertheless, the reverence given to the place of family also comes with risks to children. While parents are usually best placed to protect their children’s interests, the privacy of family life allows parents to tyrannise, abuse and neglect their children. Legal and political responses are often strongly influenced by notions of family privacy and parental autonomy that discourage interference with family life and instead promote the authority of parents, leaving children vulnerable in the private sphere of the family. This chapter explores the ambivalent current law on parental responsibilities and the rights of children. This is best seen in the law on physical punishment, where parental freedom is prioritised despite substantial evidence of its harmful effects and recognition of children’s right to equal protection from assault in international law.

Chapter 5 focuses on cases in which States have restricted the activities of individuals or communities due to concerns about religiously motivated harm. Firstly, it explores cases concerning sexual relations with minors, corporal punishment of children, compulsory vaccination refusal, and ceremonial use of illegal substances. These are the kinds of cases one would expect fall into the outermost circle in the loose concentric circles model, where there is weakest forum internum relevance and strongest countervailing factors and, thus a very low degree of forum internum protection. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the ECtHR’s approach in such cases is as expected. Secondly, through an analysis of cases concerning allegations of threats to national security, challenges to rights and freedoms of members, and transgressions of health and safety laws, this chapter also aims to show that where the ECtHR considers the harm in question is not substantiated, or State actions are disproportionate, the ECtHR can, and does, give greater weight to forum internum relevance than to countervailing factors, and offer a higher degree of protection.

Despite their diplomatic function, the Residents in office between 1798 and 1818 often preferred intimidation to accommodation. To some extent, their interventionist attitude reflected wider assumptions about the prevalence of ‘tyranny’, ‘inhumanity’, and misgovernment in India. These moral imperatives, combined with the supposed ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness of Indian allies, led Residents to argue for the necessity of unequal alliances backed by force. These convictions shaped the Residents’ relationships to the military, leading them to try and assert control over subsidiary forces in the region, and to panic when forces were disordered or insufficient. Subsidiary forces might have posed problems for the Resident, not least in the form of open mutiny, but they were also seen as essential to his control. Residents explicitly equated military and political power, and were determined to make a show of strength, contrary to the governor-general-in-council’s emphasis on conciliatory conduct. These differences of opinion become most apparent in the controversies that occasionally erupted around the Resident’s acts of judicial violence. Whereas superiors in London and Calcutta worried about undermining the Company’s claims to civilizational superiority through brutal acts of corporal punishment, in the Residents’ view civilization was instead a hindrance to be cast aside.

The Spanish judiciary thrived on complexity. Judges in the Americas worked within multiple court systems with interwoven jurisdictions and could consult seven different overlapping law codes when considering their decisions. This chapter covers the relevant judicial institutions in the context of the late eighteenth century.

The Dongo massacre, the backstories of the perpetrators, and the execution of Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco offer the most famous examples of how violence and entertainment intertwined in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Texts dating to this era chronicle the multitude of other spectacles which displayed the viceroys’ vindictive justice in the form of corporal punishment and executions. These spectacles sent out a strong message from the authorities regarding the values that they wished to promote. They expected the urban crowds to watch, hear, and smell the consequences of lawbreaking in New Spain.

This chapter discusses the prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

Among the core tenets of Britain’s much-vaunted ‘global reach’ was the belief in a shared tradition of British justice inherited from the Common Law. Though administered by way of separate judicial systems in widely disparate jurisdictions, the law nevertheless furnished a potent symbol of continuity through the force of shared judicial principles and procedures, joint-channels of appeal and a common source of legitimacy in the British Crown. In Rhodesia in the 1960s, this system was turned on its head when the increasingly isolated community of white settlers led by Ian Smith embarked on a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Legal axioms that could no longer be relied on to underwrite white authority were swiftly discarded in favour of a much cruder conception of ‘law and order’ founded on naked force. The long arm of British justice was caught embarrassingly short when the Wilson government failed to supress a rebellion of a few hundred thousand unrepentant white Rhodesians, whose agitation stemmed from the realization that they could no longer be British in their own terms. This chapter looks specifically at the furore over the Smith Government’s use of capital pubnishment against political prisoners, which came to symbolize broken allegiances and the eclipse of the common law as the sheet anchor of a global British justice.

This chapter provides an overview of parents’ discipline and punishment in relation to child development. Main types of discipline (e.g., inductive reasoning, love withdrawal, power assertion) are described, and child- (e.g., behavior problems), parent- (e.g., stress), and community- (e.g., norms) level predictors of discipline are considered. The chapter then describes moderators (child gender, child age, temperament, overall climate of the parent-child relationship, and culture) and mediators (children’s perceptions of parental love and affection, social information processing, development of empathy and conscience, neurocognition) of associations between discipline and child outcomes. Next, implications of research on discipline for practice and policy are discussed in terms of the international agenda set by the Sustainable Development Goals, national bans on corporal punishment, and parenting interventions focused on discipline. The chapter concludes by examining limitations of the current research and suggesting directions for future research.

This chapter presents a number of contact zones in the spectrum of violence, zones around which the fears, anxieties, concerns and aspirations provoked by instances of violence and their representation were concentrated. I discuss the following scenes of violence: The War Against Time; Apocalypse; The Anxiety of Remembrance; Abomination; The Nonhuman World; Spectacle. These zones do not constitute categories of violence but, like violence itself, are porous and mimetic. The temporal focus of the survey covers some six centuries, from the pre-Islamic sixth century to the twelfth century and the Crusades.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.