Uncovering the Roots of Violent Disciplinary Practices

Using corporal or emotional punishment as a disciplinary method can lead to serious physical and psychological harm, with consequences that may last throughout a child’s life. Despite this, violent disciplinary practices within families remain a global, widespread, and often underestimated issue.

This is the focus of HARSH – Uncovering the Roots of Harsh Parenting, an ERC Consolidator Grant project awarded €2 million in funding. For the first time, it will study the contextual causes underlying this phenomenon, going beyond individual and family-level factors and including emotional violence—an aspect that remains largely underexplored.

“Every parent is influenced by the social environment in which they live. This is why we aim to identify the broader cultural, economic, and institutional roots that explain the support for and use of violent disciplinary methods,” explains Elisabetta De Cao, associate professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna and principal investigator of the project. “So far, theories and empirical evidence have developed separately within disciplines such as psychology, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. With HARSH, we intend to integrate these strands of knowledge through an interdisciplinary approach.”

Professor Elisabetta De Cao, Principal Investigator of the HARSH project

The project will focus on Europe and Africa—two regions that differ markedly in terms of socioeconomic development, family structures, and social dynamics. While systematic data from Africa document the widespread use of violent disciplinary practices, in Europe there is still a lack of representative and up-to-date data needed to understand the current situation.

“A crucial aspect of our work will be the measurement of disciplinary practices, achieved both through the harmonisation of existing data and through a new large-scale survey in Europe,” says De Cao. “Only solid empirical evidence will allow us to identify the origins of the problem.”

To quantify the relationship between contextual factors and the use—or acceptance—of violent disciplinary methods, the project will employ spatial analysis tools and quantitative techniques drawn from economics. These approaches, still rarely used in studies on violence against children, can be key to identifying cause-and-effect relationships, moving beyond simple descriptive correlations, and providing a solid basis for designing effective public policies aimed at reducing and ultimately eliminating such practices.