Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of deaths by corporal punishment


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. -- Cirt (talk) 03:38, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

List of deaths by corporal punishment

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We discussed rationale for inclusion in this list on the talk page - which raised some problematic issues. Most notable of all was defining things as corporal punishment and whether some of it was simply child abuse. Finding sources to legitimately call listed items corporal punishment is hard. Furthermore we saw some BLP issues in terms of naming perpetrators, particularly prior to their trials (which flies in the face of rough BLP consensus over reporting prosecutions).

Even more concerning was the possible POV pushing issues associated with the article and it's content.

I initially suggested a merge into Corporal punishment but it was pointed out that several of the cases were already mentioned there and that the remainder were only marginal for inclusion.

Ultimately there was a growing consensus that the article should go up for deletion; so here it is :) Errant Tmorton166(Talk) 09:22, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete. A random and unstable assortment without known criteria. Where are the people executed by stoning? I see no prospect of improvement; the numbers of notable deaths are huge and unmanageable withing one list, but no one seems to care anyway. East of Borschov 13:40, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong delete - This is an unworkable list, with some viewing child abuse as corporal punishment it could mean 10000s of notable cases should be mentioned. I supported the idea of simply making this list about deaths by official corporal punishment, but such a list would be very short and not suitable for a whole article. The well sourced cases should be mentioned on the Corporal punishment page (some of which are), but without doubt this article should be deleted. BritishWatcher (talk) 14:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Essentially, this is a fluctuating list of incidents of sadistic child abuse or police brutality, all of ended in a homicide. The history indicates that examples get added and removed depending on who the latest editor is, but any attempt to catalog the world's outrages would be unmanageable.  Mandsford 17:29, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Do Not Delete. The person who administered corporal punishment to Melonie Hamber acted "as an agent of governmental power" (see Under color of authority). Whether that person acted lawfully or unlawfully is irrelevant. Melonie's death is a predictable result of a Maryland law that authorizes parents and stepparents to strike minor children with lethal weapons. The deletion of the report of Melonie's death would be nothing more than censorship on behalf of a state that empowers its citizens to strike children with lethal weapons. They can bury Melonie's body but they cannot bury their shame. MementoLaree (talk) 17:37, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: Wikipedia is not a platform for POV's --Errant Tmorton166(Talk) 17:47, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the above post is a perfect example of why this article needs deleting! BritishWatcher (talk) 18:18, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete For all the reasons listed here. BE——Critical __Talk 18:26, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Response to Errant: Wikipedia is not a platform for censorship (WP:NOTCENSORED) but censorship is exactly what the proposed deletion would be. MementoLaree (talk) 18:46, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Where the event is individually notable it will work as it's own article. The difficulty of inclusion into this list means either we will have 100's of dubiously notable/sourced events or (as is the case at the moment) one or two with no inclusion criteria. Wikipedia is a place to record; not to make a point or a stand. Please do not accuse good faith editors of censorship --Errant Tmorton166(Talk) 18:53, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 19:06, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete We cannot see any reason why this article needs to stay here - as has already been said, the article on corporal punishment may well contain a couple of examples of death by corporal punishment - to have a list which is partly a magnet for accusations, slurs and furore seems a bad move, especially (as has been stated above) there are potentially thousands of cases of deaths by corporal punishment. What constitutes a 'notable death by corporal punishment'. And finally, I don't think anyone is attempting to censor anything - we read the NOTCENSORED page, but all it seems to say is that the encylopedia should have articles about distasteful subjects where necessary - not that just because something is distasteful it instantly warrants inclusion! We can't see how it would be censorship, or any great loss, to remove this incomplete, not-very-informative and potentially damaging to those (falsely) named upon it. All the best, Artie and Wanda (talk) 19:11, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - An extremely poor list. Deaths where? Around the world??? Deaths when? Since the beginning of recorded history??? And there are just four names here? A POV trojan horse, in my estimation. Brutal seacaptains? The Spanish inquisition? Carrite (talk) 19:42, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: In Canada, people do not hit children with belts or other objects under color of authority because doing so is prohibited. See Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada (Attorney General). The tragic death of Melonie Hamber stands as a testament to the danger of using a belt to hit a child. And see Traumatic hyphemas in children secondary to corporal punishment with a belt. American Journal of Ophthalmology. Volume 135, Issue 5, Pages 719-720 (May 2003). MementoLaree (talk) 20:40, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * No, it doesn't. What it stands testament to is the unwisdom of allowing a manifest psychopath with a violent history to be in charge of a 2-year-old. As for the laws in Canada or anywhere else, they are adequately covered in Corporal punishment in the home and not relevant to this discussion. Alarics (talk) 21:00, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong delete - It's just an arbitrary list of random incidents, two of which are already mentioned in the history section of the main article. Of the rest, only one has anything to do with "corporal punishment" as generally understood, and that took place in 1921 (prison flogging) and was a man who was already weak from malaria, with no proof that it was the flogging that killed him, rather than the malaria. For my more detailed comments as to why the other individual cases cited are off the point, see here. "List of deaths from corporal punishment" conveys (and perhaps was intended to convey) the implication that people might die from ordinary spanking or paddling, which is objectively absurd, and suggests an extreme POV. Alarics (talk) 20:48, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: The List of deaths by corporal punishment is no more or less "arbitrary" or "random" than the List of unusual deaths, and you have not proposed to delete the latter list. None of the deaths on the corporal punishment list were due to spanking or paddling. That list contains an invitation to help expand it: "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it". Has that invitation been revoked? MementoLaree (talk) 21:26, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * "None of the deaths on the corporal punishment list were due to spanking or paddling." -- Exactly so! And yet spanking or paddling is what "corporal punishment" generally means. You make my point. Alarics (talk) 22:07, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete per Carrite. Surely if we include deaths by corporal punishment in and before the 19th century, this list will rapidly grow to thousands of entries long, most being not particularly notable soldiers, sailors, and criminals. Adult corporal punishment kills, not always, but often enough, and it's only been in the last 100 years that this fact has come as a surprise to anyone. If we want to restrict it to individually notable cases that already have their own articles, I could see keeping, but I only see one blue link here, that's not much of a list. --GRuban (talk) 06:53, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * "Adult corporal punishment kills, not always, but often enough," -- where did you get that idea from? I should think it is extremely rare, and non-existent in recent decades. Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei have currently some of the most severe judicial corporal punishment (up to 24 strokes of the cane), and I never heard that anybody died from it. Still, we agree that the article needs deleting. Alarics (talk) 17:13, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, that's what I wrote, it's only rare in the last 100 years. Death by flogging was relatively common in the 19th century and before. Here: "On Christmas day 1736, the Holy Inquisition held an auto de fe (Act of Faith) in Lima's main square where twenty women would be flogged to death".  "At one time men were literally flogged to death with a hundred lashes or more. The figure three hundred has been mentioned in history, and in the time of Czar Nicholas II a common punishment in Russia was one-thousand lashes; Peter the Great had limited the number in the Russian army to two-hundred. As late as the early 17th century a thousand lashes was a punishment for mutiny and other serious offences in the British forces; this was more prolonged than hanging but just as fatal." Here are more books links about death from flogging that don't lend themselves to easy copy and paste.  And why do you think 24 strokes is the most severe even in this day and age? Here is 100 lashes, I'm sure I can find more with more than a minute of looking.  --GRuban (talk) 18:24, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Because Islamic "lashes" in the Middle East are nowhere near as severe as strokes of the cane in the British tradition as in Singapore etc. 100 strokes of the cane probably would kill. Alarics (talk) 18:34, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I bow to your clear expertise about specifics. I hope I have, however, shown that death by corporal punishment in earlier centuries was not particularly rare or unusual. --GRuban (talk) 19:04, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete as per nominator. Unmanagable list with no clear definition for inclusion. Edward321 (talk) 13:04, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.