In a jarring exchange during a recent debate hosted by 9News, Congressional candidate Gabe Evans appeared to endorse some forms of child beatings by parents and public school officials.
In my view, any form of hitting a child, whether called beating, corporal punishment, or spanking, constitutes child abuse, just like any form of hitting one’s spouse constitutes domestic violence. The difference is that physically abusing a child sometimes remains legal (at least in practice), while abusing one’s spouse (or any other adult) is uniformly illegal. Evans seems to favor carving out a space for beating a child in a way that the law does not deem abusive.
As the debate moderator Kyle Clark pointed out, Evans, also a member of the state legislature, voted against last year’s bill, HB23-1191, to ban child beating in public schools. That bill ultimately passed the state House 48 to 16 and the state Senate 32 to 3 before being signed by the governor.
Clark first asked Evans about his stance on school choice: “Mr. Evans, you’re on the record supporting school vouchers for private schools, using taxpayer money to support private or religious schools. And Donald Trump’s plan calls for universal school choice. How would you like to see that accomplished at the federal level?
Evans replied: “Right now in Colorado, we have an education crisis. I’ve got two boys. They’re school-aged kids. . . . Sixty percent of our third graders aren’t reading at the third grade level when they’re in third grade. Seventy percent of them can’t do math at the eighth grade level when they’re in eighth grade. . . . We need to put parents, students, and teachers back in charge of education. And so, what I’ve always supported is an environment that allows parents and families that choice to be able to select the education that works best for them. To me, that means two things. It means parents can see what their kids are being taught, and they can actually select a school that works for them. They’re not locked into something that’s underperforming just because they happen to live in the wrong zip code. And so I think that we’ve seen this succeed in other places. And so I will always be a very firm believer that allowing parents, families more choice, putting them, along with teachers, back in control of education, rather than bureaucrats, is the way that we move our education system forward.”
Evans’s statistics on school performance are roughly correct, per results from the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, if we take that test’s categories of meeting or exceeding expectations as comparable to grade level.
Notably, Evans did not answer the question about what, specifically, he thinks should be done about school choice at the federal level. Libby Stanford’s article for Education Week reports, “The authors of Project 2025, many of whom served in the first Trump administration and are allies of the former president, argue that the next president should eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, and that existing federal education funding streams should be restructured so they flow to parents for use toward education expenses outside of the public school system.” Eventually, though, that funding stream would be eliminated under the plan.
Stanford continues, “Project 2025 also calls on lawmakers to pass the Educational Choice for Children Act, a Senate bill that would create a tax credit for individuals and businesses who donate to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships.” Further, the Republican platform says (in Stanford’s words) that government “should expand the potential uses of 529 education savings accounts, which families typically use to save for college tuition, so families can also use them to cover homeschooling expenses.” Finally, Stanford notes, the federal government potentially could use “incentives” to states to induce them to expand school choice programs.
Colorado already has robust school choice programs, although not universal vouchers. State government funds (otherwise) private preschools. Parents may choose to send their children to other public schools, including charter schools, space allowing. And parents may homeschool their children or send them to private school, at the parents’ expense. Some tax-funded programs do exist for homeschooled students, typically involving programs offered by school districts one day per week.
Then Clark asked Evans a more pointed question: “You’re a vocal supporter of the Christian homeschooling movement, and you’re a member of a Christian group called Heritage Defense, which defends parents accused of beating their children, or, as the group describes corporal punishment, ‘following Biblical protocol in the training and discipline of their children.’ As a state legislator, last year you voted against a ban on corporal punishment in Colorado’s public schools. A brief answer, please. When do you believe that it is acceptable to hit a child at home, and at school?”
Evans replied, “That answer is already in the law right now. It’s in Title 18-1-703. So you can go refer to the law where it talks about the special exception that parents and guardians have when they’re tasked with the upbringing for a minor.”
Section 18-1-703, titled, “Use of physical force—special relationships,” says, in part:
“The use of physical force upon another person that would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal . . . [in that a] parent, guardian, or other person entrusted with the care and supervision of a minor or an incompetent person, and a teacher or other person entrusted with the care and supervision of a minor, may use reasonable and appropriate physical force upon the minor or incompetent person when and to the extent it is reasonably necessary and appropriate to maintain discipline or promote the welfare of the minor or incompetent person.”
Notably, this language does not expressly allow for the beating of children. Evans seems to be relying on the perceived implication that beating a child, in some contexts, is “reasonable and appropriate . . . to maintain discipline or promote the welfare of the minor.” I would argue that beating a child, in any form, is never reasonable, appropriate, or welfare-promoting. As Jill Anderson summarizes for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Research has long underscored the negative effects of spanking on children’s social-emotional development, self-regulation, and cognitive development.”
Evans did not mention that Colorado statutes elsewhere expressly outlaw child abuse, which would include at least some forms of child beatings (I would say it properly covers all forms of child beatings). Section 18-6-401 states, in part:
“A person commits child abuse if such person causes an injury to a child’s life or health, or permits a child to be unreasonably placed in a situation that poses a threat of injury to the child’s life or health, or engages in a continued pattern of conduct that results in malnourishment, lack of proper medical care, cruel punishment, mistreatment, or an accumulation of injuries that ultimately results in the death of a child or serious bodily injury to a child.”
In my view, beating a child in any way inherently causes injury to a child’s health. Thus, in my view, a prosecutor could prosecute any adult for beating any child, although a jury might excuse mild forms of child beatings. Milder forms of “spanking,” then, in practice remain legal.
Notably, the same statutes forbid any form of female genital mutilation and expressly states, “Belief that the conduct described . . . is required as a matter of custom, ritual, or standard practice or consent to the conduct by the child on whom it is performed or by the child’s parent or legal guardian shall not be an affirmative defense to a charge of child abuse under this paragraph.”
As adults legally may not mutilate a girl’s genitals, regardless of their personal or religious beliefs, so adults should not be able to beat children, regardless of their personal or religious beliefs. Unfortunately, as I have pointed out, sometimes courts are willing to exempt people from laws that apply to everyone else just because of their religious beliefs.
Obviously prosecutors can and do pursue criminal charges against adults who beat children severely. Craig Silverman wrote of a case involving the preacher Bob Enyart, who beat his seven-year-old stepson to-be with a belt. George Brauchler, a Republican who, as a prosecutor, was involved in Enyart’s misdemeanor prosecution, told Silverman:
“[Enyart] was completely remorseless. At one point, with the picture of the broken skin on the back side of this boy, he proclaimed to the jury that he would like to see that picture blown up and hung over the boy’s bed with the caption, ‘this is how much I love you.’ His position was, spare the rod, spoil the child. It was a cringe moment for those six jurors. . . . Self-righteousness is really what cost him his liberty. . . . He had a chance to come in and apologize and talk about lessons learned and when the judge asked him at sentencing, what do you want your kids to learn from this case and your conviction, and his answer was, just very confident, that I’d like them to know that our criminal justice system can be wrong, too.”
In defending his beating of the young boy, Enyart cited two explicitly Christian books, James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline and Debbi Pearl’s Train Up a Child. As Kathryn Joyce writes for Slate, Pearl’s book has been “implicated in the beating deaths” of several children.
Getting back to the debate, Clark cut in: “How about public school? When is it appropriate for a child to be hit in public school?”
Evans replied (or failed to reply), “We need to ensure that we are providing a safe space for our kids to be able to learn in our public schools. I was a part-time school resource [officer]. . . ” At this point, Clark cut Evans off, pointing out that “there was a security exception” to the law in question, but that was not the issue at hand. Clark again asked, “When should children be hit in school?” Evans again evaded the question, and Clark moved to the next issue.
There is only one appropriate answer to the question, “When should children be hit in school,” and that is, “Never,” a word that Evans declined to utter.
As Clark said, Heritage Defense, which says its mission is to defend the “biblical family,” defends some parents accused, as the organization describes it, of “excessive corporal punishment.” The group defends parents from various other accusations as well.
Focus on the Family, which James Dobson founded, continues to endorse “Biblical Spanking.” The organization points out that the popular line, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” actually is a variant of Proverbs 13:24, which states (in the organization’s preferred translation), “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”
Others, however, interpret the same passage, not to mean that parents should beat their children with sticks or “rods,” but that parents should offer their children “support” and “guidance” with a guiding “staff.”
Regardless, ancient religious texts should not dictate modern law. Beating a child is a form of child abuse, and government should outlaw child abuse in all its forms, as it outlaws violence against spouses in all its forms. Similarly, just because the Bible sanctions slavery and the murder of “witches,” doesn’t mean modern law should allow such atrocities. Nor should the fact that spanking long was part of typical family life deter modern legislators from protecting children. After all, wife beating also used to be widely practiced by men, but we’ve been able to overcome such violence, at least so far as the law is concerned. As Steven Pinker documents in his book “The Better Angles of Our Nature,” absolutely monstrous treatment of children long was the norm, but we’ve been able to largely overcome such horrors. Now it’s time to finish the job.
Government properly exists to protect people’s rights, and children, like all people, have the right not to be physically assaulted. That is something even candidates for Congress should be able to understand.
