Child Abuse: The Rod of Correction

Some had to march out to work in the fields every day, they say, lashed together. Recalcitrants were beaten with a 3-ft. length of plastic pipe called "the rod of correction." Serious infractions were to be punished by days in a new jail cell. It was tiny, only 24 sq. ft., but then so were its prospective inmates, boys from five to 17. The compound in Walterboro, S.C., is not a prison but a Dickensian boarding school called the New Bethany Baptist Church Home for Boys. Police raided the place last week. Said Prosecutor Randolph Murdaugh: "I've never seen kids beaten as badly as they were beaten by those allegedly Christian people." School Superintendent Olin King and two employees were charged with child neglect and, for keeping a boy in the cell, kidnaping.

King and his associates, out on bail, are angry. Said School Lawyer Oren Briggs, oblivious to the irony: "I wouldn't treat a dog like they've treated us." Why were children beaten? King, a Fundamentalist, referred to Proverbs 22: 15: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." He decided on his own that plastic pipe was what the Scripture intended. Michael, 11, did not see it that way. "They didn't have the true word of God there," he said. "It was all fake."