(These were the words of a nanny, describing how she felt as she washed a 3 year old child's mouth out with soap).
"Call me a sadist, but I got such pleasure out of doing it." --
Forcing a child to ingest noxious substances either as a punishment or
as an attempted lesson should be considered intentional poisoning. The
old-fashioned practice of washing the child's mouth out with soap to
cleanse it of the pollution of forbidden words can cause injury more
serious than just an upset stomach. A child died when he aspirated soap
into his lungs during such a lesson. Another death from asphyxiation
occurred when a mother poured the contents of a pepper shaker down her
child's throat. So much pepper went into the his windpipe that he could
not breathe. A six-year old boy died of potassium poisoning when his
foster father put more than two tablespoons of Morton's Lite Salt on his
food "to teach him the taste of salt". The child craved salt and ate
large quantities of it after he was placed in the foster home. The foster
father apparently thought that if the child got a large enough dose of
salt that he would stop craving it. In a small town in Missouri, the
principal caught two junior high school boys with cigarettes. His little
joke for years for teenage smokers has been "Bend over or eat 'em".
This time, the boys took his dare and ate 18 cigarettes between them.
Fortunately, they vomited the tobacco before it could poison them; a law
suit was filed claiming that one of the boys developed stomach ulcers
from this punishment.
--
THINK TWICE: THE MEDICAL EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT
by Lesli Taylor, M.D.
Adah Maurer, Ph.D.