CNN Guest Likens 'Hurtful and Harmful' Spanking to 'Segregated Schools'

Matthew Balan | September 16, 2014
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[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]

Areva Martin brought in the specter of Jim Crow on the 15 September 2014 edition of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, as she commented on the child abuse case against NFL player Adrian Peterson. Martin contended that "corporal punishment, in any form, is abusive," and emphasized, "We used to not wear helmets when we rode bikes. Women used to smoke when they were pregnant. We used to send our kids to segregated schools. So, there are a lot of things we did twenty and thirty years ago that we now know are hurtful and harmful."

The attorney later cited her personal experience of riding her bike without a helmet as a kid, and cited unnamed researchers to support her assertion:

AREVA MARTIN, LEGAL AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR: ...My parents put me on a bike without a helmet. That was dangerous then; it's dangerous now. They didn't know any better...but we know better. We have the data; we have the statistics; we have the studies that confirm that there are long-term, psychological/emotional scars from hitting children. So, we can't bury our heads in the sand on this. We have to accept that data; accept the harm it's done to kids; and just stop hitting. We tell five-year-olds, no hitting. We criminalize assaults by adults on other adults. So we can't accept an adult hitting a child, when we don't accept an adult hitting an adult.

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