![]() ![]() Now one might ask, “why didn’t I think to call child protective service or reach out for help?” I didn’t because I grew up with the notion that this was “normal.” This was a “normal” loving father using “normal” corporal punishment to bring me up as a “normal,” polite, law-abiding person. I remember being in pain for a whole month every time I had to sit down on a chair. By the end of that session, I looked like I had come out of a car crash. The 40 spanks that he promised turned into 70. It was mortifying, humiliating, and disgusting. But my father said I had to take it off because in order to learn my lesson, I had to feel the fresh pain on the flesh. I asked if I can keep my underwear on because of my bleeding. I was having my period that day, and at that time I hadn’t started using tampons yet. After an argument with my parents, I had run away in the middle of the night and returned after two days. The very last time I got a spanking was a month after I turned 15. The bruises were darker and lasted longer. The times he would lose himself, the pain was more extreme, as I absorbed all of his aggression and toxic anger directly onto my skin. My father was an emotionally damaged man, who had very few outlets to communicate his soul and demons, so most times he used ‘corporal punishment,’ on me, he lost his temper and control. ![]() Around this time, my mother’s pleads became more and more desperate. During the ages 13-15, when we moved to the United States, the hitting became harsher, more frequent, and angrier. I knew my friends were getting spanked by their parents too, and I assumed they were going through punishments just as painful and mortifying. So yes, from the age of 7 to 15, I took my father’s ‘no-pants spanking’ as a normal rite of passage. ![]() You have to endure it and calm him down, to keep your family intact. Her sisters, her mother, everyone told her something along the lines of, “That’s what husbands do from time to time. She was a petrified victim of domestic abuse and it had become all too normalized. She too was a victim of my father’s temper and beatings from now and then, so all she could do in these incidents were to stand by and beg my father to take it easy. I remember feeling humiliated and violated and I recall telling my mother I would so much prefer it if he let me keep my pants on. Depending on the severity of the “wrong-doing” the number of spanks would range between 20-100 hits. He would start by hitting my behind with the 2 by 4, then when my skin got too red, he would turn me over and hit the front of my thighs, right underneath the crotch. He would have me take my pants and underwear off and make me lie on my stomach or lean on a couch at an angle. His choice of body part was the buttocks. It was too sturdy to break, no matter how angry he would get. He used a wooden spatula in my younger years, but as my body grew, the spatulas would break, so he always had a 2 x 4 ready in the basement. The usual Korean spankings range from getting whipped on the hands, whipped on the back of the calves, spanked on the buttocks, to good ol’ slapping and hitting all over the body. That stick is too large for her.” “She’ll learn to be more careful and gingerly, if she gets spanked,” my father said sternly. I distinctly remember my father about to execute ‘corporal punishment’ and my mother pleading to him, “She’s too young. I had spilled a whole bottle of orange juice on the kitchen floor. My earliest memory of getting spanked hard was when I was 7 years old. My father strongly adhered to this notion. The saying in South Korea goes that a child that grows up with the whip, grows into a wiser and better human. Where I grew up, it was conventional to use corporal punishment when the kids misbehave. ![]() From the outside, we were a pretty average upper-middle-class family - my father was a mechanical engineer at a university research center and my mother was a stay-at-home mom with one daughter and one son. My family immigrated to the United States when I was in middle school. I grew up in a small suburban town called Pohang in South Korea. (Editors’ Note: The introduction to the series on #everydaysexualviolence is here. ![]()
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