Law Reform, Corporal Punishment and Child Abuse: The Case of Sweden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 70 years, Sweden has implemented a series of proactive legal reforms aimed at eliminating the corporal punishment of children in homes, schools and institutions. The most recent of these reforms took place in 1979 when Sweden became the first nation to explicitly abolish corporal punishment. The primary purposes of the ban were to recognize and affirm children's rights to security of the person and to inform the public and professionals that corporal punishment is neither socially acceptable nor legally defensible. It was expected that, over time, parents would demonstrate decreasing support for this practice and decreasing use of it. Ultimately, it was expected that the ban, and the legal reforms that led up to it, would contribute to lower levels of parental violence toward children. In the present article, evidence from a variety of sources is examined to assess trends in child physical abuse in Sweden over time. It is concluded that acts of violence against children have declined dramatically in Sweden over recent decades corporal punishment is infrequent, serious assaults are uncommon, and child abuse fatalities are extremely rare. Implications of legal reform for the well-being of children are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".