Strauss has spent more than two decades examining in various contexts the transmission of violence from parents to children, and from that to adolescent and adulthood violence. In 1988, USA Today quoted from one of Strauss' many studies:
The more adults use violence for either criminal or legitimate purposes (such as corporal punishment in school), the higher the rate of youth violence. If we want non-violent teenagers, we must also renounce the use of violence, including violence for morally correct
Strauss views "legitimate" (i.e., morally correct) physical punishment as:
a legally permissible attack on children. The most common forms are spanking, slapping, grabbing, and shoving a child "roughly"--with more force than needed to move the child. Hitting a child with an object is also legally permissible and widespread. Parents in the United States and most countries have a legal right to carry out these attacks, as do teachers in most U.S. states and most nations; whereas, the same act is a criminal assault if carried out by someone not in a custodial relationship to the child.
In this study, Strauss documented that the more parents had been physically punished as children, the more likely they were to physically punish their own children.
While there may be an obvious correlation between parent-to child-to society violence, statistics reveal that the increase in violent juvenile crime is not mirroring crime as it affects the whole of society. Between 1985 and 1989, for example, arrests of children under age 18 for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter
rose by 16.8 percent, while at the same time homicide accounted for the deaths of 2,771 children ages 10 to 19, an increase of 48
percent from 1984 and more than a 100 percent increase over 1965. But between 1989 and 1992, as juvenile homicide arrests skyrocketed up by 93 percent, there was only a 16 percent increase in the number of adult arrests for h...