Les punitions corporelles selon les représentations de parents ordinaires. Une étude colombienne

Abstract

Corporal punishment is a socio-educational fact, in the worldwide. Working to eradicate this practice implies knowing and understanding the ideological foundations, which maintain and update it in family educational contexts. This paper shows a survey carried out in the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, with ordinary fathers and mothers, aimed at extracting from the parental discourse the information, beliefs, feelings, and attitudes, concerning physical punishment, to reconstruct them in a representational framework, through the application of conceptualizing categories, following the methodology pro- posed by Paille and Mucchielli (2012). From the parental stories, rationalization schemes and a modulated discourse emerge, aimed at explaining and justifying the practice of corporal punishment. The work of articulation categories constituted from the data collected leaves important clues of the sociocultural and ideological framework, which sup- ports the continuity of punishment as a social heritage.