Disputing Discipline: Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

By Franziska Fay

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978821750

Book preview

Disputing Discipline

Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies is dedicated to increasing our understanding of children and childhoods throughout the world, reflecting a perspective that highlights cultural dimensions of the human experience. The books in this series are intended for students, scholars, practitioners, and those who formulate policies that affect children’s everyday lives and futures.

Series Board

Stuart Aitken, geography, San Diego State University

Jill Duerr Berrick, social welfare, University of California, Berkeley

Caitlin Cahill, social science and cultural studies, Pratt Institute

Susan Danby, education, Queensland University of Technology

Julian Gill-Peterson, transgender and queer studies, University of Pittsburgh

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, sociology, University of Sheffield

Stacey Lee, educational policy studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sunaina Maria, Asian American studies, University of California, Davis

David M. Rosen, anthropology and sociology, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Rachael Stryker, human development and women’s studies, Cal State East Bay

Tom Weisner, anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

Disputing Discipline

Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

FRANZISKA FAY

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Fay, Franziska, author.

Title: Disputing discipline : child protection, punishment, and piety in Zanzibar schools / Franziska Fay.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029101 | ISBN 9781978821743 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978821736 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978821750 (epub) | ISBN 9781978821767 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978821774 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: School discipline—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Corporal punishment of children—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Rewards and punishments in education—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Child welfare—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Children—Tanzania—Zanzibar—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC LB3012.4.T34 F39 2021 | DDC 371.509678/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029101

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Franziska Fay

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my grandmother Ingrid, and my mother Christina

CONTENTS

A Note on Language and Translation

Introduction

1 Being Young in Zanzibar

2 Childhood with/out Punishment

3 Children and Child Protection

4 Child Protection in Zanzibar Schools

5 Gender, Islam, and Child Protection

6 Decolonizing Child Protection

7 Beyond Well-Being, toward Children

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Swahili Terms

Notes

References

Index

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION

All translations from Swahili unless otherwise noted are mine. All interviews referred to in the text were conducted in Swahili between January 2014 and July 2015. To protect my interlocutors’ anonymity, I use pseudonyms. Swahili, including words derived from Arabic, is given in Standard Swahili Spelling (Kiswahili Sanifu).

Disputing Discipline

Introduction

A crooked queue of different-sized children wearing top-white, bottom-blue school uniforms, some worn, some freshly ironed, appears in front of me as I step through the gate of Kisamaki Primary School. It is a hot day in May 2015, and the lined-up little heads turn toward me as I make my way across the courtyard. How are you guys (hamjambo), I want to know and quickly receive a response from a boy toward the back of the line: Badly (vibaya). Surprised by his response, which in ever-polite Swahili is unusually frank, I wonder why the children are lining up and follow up. Badly? But why? Because of the cane (mikwaju), is the answer I receive. Kisamaki Primary in Zanzibar Town has been one of Save the Children’s pilot schools for its child protection program against corporal punishment since 2012. Therefore, I am very surprised that the first thing I see as I enter is a group of children waiting to be hit. In search of Mwalimu Hamadi, the headmaster whom I am supposed to meet, I pass by the soon-to-be-disciplined students and enter the main school building. Quickly I am led to his office and then on to the staff room where I am told to wait. I can also wait over there, I propose as I point toward a bench next to the front of the line of children. There, where the children say they will be hit (watapopigwa). With a nervous laugh Mwalimu Hamadi responds, "But no, in our school children are not hit (watoto hawapigwi). Just wait in the staff room." I do so but station myself by the door where I can still watch the scene. Mwalimu Hamadi now attends to the line and hits every child on the behind two to three times with a cane. The students must move forward individually, face the wall, and hold their hands up high against it. Some are visibly pained, some laugh, and many jump away playfully and seem little disturbed.

Corporal Punishment

Corporal punishment is an emotive issue—to witness as well as to research and write about. Researching child protection and corporal punishment required me to witness cases of physical chastisement while sitting, often awkwardly, in the back of primary and Qur’anic school classrooms. It entailed being a frequent witness to situations that ‘Western’ activists would deem an abuse of children’s rights (Perry 2009, 49) and classify as violence. Nevertheless, the practice was considered normal in many countries of the Global North up to the 1970s, and smacking—as one aspect of corporal punishment—continues to be widely socially tolerated in the home in countries like Great Britain, where hitting children seems to be acceptable as long as no mark is left (GIECP 2016). In line with the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, for example, physical chastisement is considered legalized violence against children (GIECP 2015). France achieved a full legal prohibition of all forms of corporal punishment, including in the home, in 2019, and Germany in 2000. It was only with the global emergence of a child rights perspective that the line between abuse and discipline was gradually drawn (Montgomery 2008).

Laws around child protection and corporal punishment have been central tools in the negotiation over altering existing standards of discipline. The adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989—one of the most globalized political values of our times (Wilson 1997, 1)—laid the very foundation for the global children’s rights and child protection discourses and started a new era for thinking about young people and their rights and needs. The CRC is also the first treaty to directly address children’s protection from violence (Freeman 2010, 219). Tanzania, including its semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar, ratified the CRC in 1991.

Article 19 specifically emphasizes the need for state parties to have proper laws in place to prohibit violence against children, as well as measures to protect them from all forms of violence, both physical and psychological. Article 3 states that protection and care necessary for the child’s well-being must be ensured through respective institutions, services, and facilities. In 1990, only a year after the adoption of the CRC, a regional human rights treaty that emphasizes both children’s rights and their responsibilities—the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC)—was adopted, and it entered into force in 1999. The ACRWC requires states to protect children from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, which is stated as including physical or mental injury, abuse, or maltreatment while in the care of a parent, guardian, or other caregiver (article 16); it also spells out parents’ and other caregivers’ duty to ensure that discipline is administered with humanity and in a manner consistent with the inherent dignity of the child (article 20). Tanzania ratified the ACRWC in 2003. In 2011, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar passed the Zanzibar Children’s Act.¹ This locally developed comprehensive child rights law acknowledges the need for protective intervention and paved the way for protection programs in and outside of Zanzibar’s schools. Through a children’s rights lens, thus, corporal punishment is a violation of human rights.

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IN ZANZIBAR, children’s rights and child protection in the universalized sense of those concepts have only been introduced into societal discussions over the past decade or so. Disputing Discipline is an ethnography of the reactions and positions on these matters within the institutionalized contexts of education and international development where most of these discussions and negotiations take place. In those spaces the struggles that exist around children’s rights and their protection are prominent and most easily observable.

The continuation of corporal punishment—which can be easily observed in institutionalized settings like the school—has become a central concern of international child rights organizations like Save the Children or UNICEF. The child protection interventions these organizations plan and implement frequently focus on the eradication of physical chastisement where it is known to continue. This, too, is the case at Kisamaki Primary School in Zanzibar, where I observed one of what was probably many routinized group chastisements. Even though from 2012 onward the school was one of Save the Children Zanzibar’s pilot institutions for the Positive Discipline program designed to eliminate corporal punishment (see figure I.1), hitting as a form of discipline was far from in the past when I visited two years later. Mwalimu Hamadi’s assurance that the students were not being hit or beaten (hawapigwi), while caning them in front of me, clearly indicated the multiple dimensions and interpretations of the matter.

Generally, there is much disagreement over what corporal punishment actually entails. Echoing Mwalimu Hamadi’s seemingly contradictory stance, the Zanzibari government claims that corporal punishment does not apply in the education system, but caning is said to indeed be administered in schools as a legitimate and acceptable form of punishment [not intended to] be violent, abusive or degrading (GIECP 2016, 2). Indeed, although the Zanzibar Children’s Act of 2011 states in article 14 that children should not be subjected to violence, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, it also allows parents to discipline their children in such manner which shall not amount to injury to the child’s physical and mental well-being. Further, Zanzibar’s Education Act of 1988 includes Regulations for Corporal Punishment that allow but restrict the administration of caning to up to three strokes to the headmaster. Such room for individual interpretation makes these laws little more than well-meaning rhetoric, proving that legislation alone is insufficient to transform persisting attitudes and behaviors (Sidebotham 2015, 391).

Despite having committed to the CRC, Tanzania remains one of the seventeen states in which corporal punishment is not fully prohibited in any setting, including being used as a sentence in the judicial system for crimes.² Although neighboring Kenya achieved full prohibition in 2010, in Zanzibar, corporal punishment is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, normalized and contested. It still exists as an ordinary practice throughout almost all educational contexts. At the same time, physical chastisement is problematized under the international gaze, which condemns it and opposes its continuation based on children’s rights approaches. Whereas UNICEF (2011) considers it the most common form of violence experienced by children on an everyday basis in Zanzibari schools, locally it is frequently merely categorized as a form of discipline. Commonly, only its harsh application that disregards religious rules for its administration is rejected, whereas its lighter application—smacking—is generally accepted.

FIGURE I.1 Signs of the Child Protection Unit and the Unit for Alternative Forms of Discipline in Vuga, Zanzibar Town.

Disputing Discipline does not question whether child protection interventions should or should not exist. Instead, taking as the point of departure that child protection actors’ and policy makers’ genuine will is to protect children’s best interests (Seymour 2011, 228), the book considers what existing interventions do. Instead of denouncing corporal punishment as an interruption to everyday life—which is primarily the task of child rights activists—the book considers it through the lens of anthropology as an integral part of childhood socialization in Zanzibar. It focuses on the whys and hows of what works and what falls short to help us understand better why well-intentioned child protection programs sometimes fail or are rejected. My hesitation to rush to make moral judgments arises from the imperative to take seriously my informants’ viewpoints and multiple understandings of protection. After the investigation of different moral positions that exist in Zanzibar, I thus abstain from defending an overarching authority of universal human rights as both abstract universalism and cultural relativism would posit an essentialist approach to social phenomena (Nieuwenhuys 2008: 6). This book postpones political dialogue with child protection policy makers and is in the first place a reproduction of a social situation that aims to speak for itself. As with pain there is a moral demand to respond to its expression (Stanley Cavell, quoted in Das 2007, xi), this also held true for witnessing Zanzibari children’s pain. In this context, it was impossible to be interested in both child discipline and protection but at the same time remain outside the order of it (Das 2015a).³ Ultimately, and in light of the impossibility of political neutrality, I tend to side with those who claimed to suffer from the child protection programs I investigated and from the corporal punishment I frequently observed.

Child Protection

From the 1920s, anthropological explorations of the diversity of childhoods and children’s lives started to grow (Mead 1928; Malinowski 1929; Firth 1936; Fortes 1949; Lévi-Strauss [1955] 1961; Richards 1956). From the 1980s, child abuse and children’s suffering became a distinct topic of anthropological research (Korbin 1981; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Bluebond-Langner 1987). Child protection, nevertheless, as an individual policy field and central ethnographic object, has only recently come into focus (Boyden, Pankhurst, and Tafere 2012; Pells 2012; Montgomery 2015). Those child protection programs that build their efforts on the CRC have come to be considered as often lacking a self-critical attitude (Bourdillon and Myers 2012b, 617). Ethnographic accounts of child protection activities have identified the problematic potential of universalized protection approaches to decontextualize and spatialize (Bourdillon and Myers 2012a; Hart 2012). These interventions aim to respond to child abuse and neglect, but more than delivering professional services, they also aim to change people’s child-rearing practices, attitudes, and values. In so doing, they occasionally also fail to see the cultural and historical significance of these values, especially their positive features (Boyden et al. 2012, 519) and thus may encounter reluctance and opposition from those they target and involve.

In Zanzibar, the government first began to develop a systematic approach to child protection as a distinct policy field after Tanzania—which the Zanzibar archipelago has belonged to since 1964—became the first African country to conduct a National Study on Violence against Children in 2009; according to UNICEF, which conducted the study, violence against children included physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect; physical abuse included hitting (UNICEF 2011, 7). Measuring forms of sexual, physical, and emotional violence against children, this study found that corporal punishment is the most common form of violence that children experience on an everyday basis in schools.

Since the passing of the Zanzibar Children’s Act, Save the Children and UNICEF, in collaboration with the Zanzibari government, have led the implementation of child protection defined as a set of measures and structures to prevent and respond to abuse, neglect, violence and exploitation affecting children (Save the Children 2013, 5). The integrated approach aims to improve children’s quality of life by limiting practices considered harmful or abusive according to the CRC.

Schools have become central intervention points for child protection programs, whose goal is seen as the eradication of corporal punishment as a normalized disciplinary practice; preventing it from a further descent into the ordinary (Das 2007) is central to these approaches. Although local and international attempts to implement the Zanzibar Children’s Act have been praised, a constructive critique of the less positive effects of these attempts has not yet been done. This lack of self-critique and an insufficient engagement with the unintended consequences of protection measures that may interfere with young people’s everyday lives also hold true for child protection programs in Zanzibar schools.

This book sets out to provide such a critical reflection by showing that child protection programs are frequently perceived as supporting a Westernization of Zanzibari society and vernacular child-rearing norms and to carry connotations of moral devaluation. In Disputing Discipline I oppose the assumption that child protection programs are beyond the need for contestation and focus on the voices that hold hesitation and reluctance to engage with such well-intending interventions. Through a detailed exploration of children’s and adults’ ideas and experiences of punishment and protection in educational settings in Zanzibar Town, the book engages in a critical exploration of children’s (human) rights governance. It unravels disagreements regarding the compatibility of vernacular standards of protecting children with the universalized standards of internationally initiated child protection programs.

Generally, people the world over understand children as human beings in need of protection. However, how we conceive of children and childhood and also think about children’s safety and well-being are influenced by the sociocultural contexts in which we learned to think and know. Even though many people in Zanzibar support the continuation of corporal punishment and oppose protection programs that intend to eradicate the practice, most would claim to live a moral life. The path by which an individual legitimizes hitting as morally righteous and feels demoralized by this prohibition is unique to each teller. In line with Arthur Kleinman’s understanding of the moral as the local and ethics as universals (2006, 2), I therefore dive deep into the many local ways of making morality around child-rearing in Zanzibar. I complement this with the multiple universals of child-rearing ethics, with all potential tensions and conflicts in mind. Put differently, I show how national and international child rights activists are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape in a complex interplay between local and global child protection politics and explore the ethical assumptions underlying globalized protective interventions and the moral issues these potentially cause for people in Zanzibar. Above all I explore Zanzibari children’s moral lives and ethical challenges and consider the moral issues that they encounter when they are involved in child protection programs. I focus on the values and obligations they deem important in their lives and on which they hold each other to account (Woods 2013). The concepts that turned out to be central to this endeavor include manners/courtesy, chastisement, safety, piety, empathy, and respect.

Disputing Discipline hopes to open up a space for discussion around what it means to be young, to be safe, and to be pious at the same time and at the intersection of global development intervention. Although it seeks to unmake the assumption that child-rights–based approaches are always in the best interest of the child, it also aims to offer a new perspective on child protection by privileging experiences from a Muslim-majority setting. The book elicits understandings of potentially harmful child-care practices and broadens knowledge about cultural constructions of violence and their various meanings in different contexts (Crewe 2010, 49; Korbin 2003). Compared to explorations of children’s chastisement, there is a paucity of research on the effects of child protection measures for Muslim children and adults. Building on Michael Bourdillon and William Myers’s critique of standardised, one-size-fits-all policies to protect children (2012b, 615) and their call for more critical engagement with what are often uncritically assumed to be protective approaches, this book privileges being young and doing well as constitutive of the construction of child protection experiences. Even though, with the increasing presence of international organizations in Zanzibar, children’s rights are increasingly recognized, iterated, and performed in public, child protection programming still faces many challenges. Not only do international child protection actors encounter opposition in their endeavors but local Zanzibari child protection workers are also equally criticized for promoting the decay of Zanzibari-Islamic morality. Inversely, vernacular modes of knowing how to care for children and approaches to specifically Islamic imaginations of modernity hold the least authority in official discursive hierarchies of protection knowledge, and parents and teachers frequently feel undermined in autonomously knowing what is in the best interests of their children.

Child protection programs that try to ban a practice that officially is not illegal inevitably face challenges. Protection interventions set out to change existing values and related practices, and their dissemination of different moral truths influences how childhood and children’s well-being are socially constructed—often without considering their cultural and historical significance. As Paul Rabinow put it well, these are pre-existing moral landscapes to which the carriers of rights culture bring their message of change and improvement (2001, 142). In line with this, many of my research participants identified tensions in the fact that child protection programs intend to eliminate the use of corporal punishment, while at the same time there is no legal ban of the practice in Zanzibar. About Save the Children’s Positive Discipline program, a member of the Zanzibar Teachers Union (ZATU) stated, "The project is hypocritical (unafiki). If the ministry truly intends to stop corporal punishment, why have they not changed the regulations (kufuta kanuni hii)? The heads of the ministry themselves want the cane/corporal punishment to continue" (bakora inedelee). And a sheikh at the Mufti’s Office emphasized similarly that "laws have to change (sheria zibadilike), be enforced (isimamiwe) and implemented (itekelezwe), and teachers and parents must be ready to embrace these changes" (kupokea mabadiliko).

What Children Say

Listening to what children say about child protection and corporal punishment matters. Both practices concern young people first and foremost, so it should be their views and opinions that we take seriously when discussing their well-being and how it can be improved. Young people’s accounts—largely in the form of visual and written productions such as photographs, drawings, poems, and stories—present the central data that this book’s discussions take as point of departure. Listening to what makes children want to go to school or not illuminated the features of schooling and learning that matter to children themselves. My young research participants’ thoughts on what they liked and disliked about state school and madrasa offered insights into characteristics of the Zanzibari education system through the eyes of its attendees.

Those who expressed positive feelings about schools often emphasized the importance of education and repeatedly invoked the metaphor, "education is the key to life (elimu ni ufunguo wa maisha)." Children’s reasons for liking school included the following:

Because with an education I can drive our country’s nation (niendeshe taifa la nchi) and education is the command of God (amri ya Mwenyezi Mungu) (boy, age thirteen)

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Because "education is light (nuru) and can get you any job" (girl, age twelve)

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"When I can study calmly (kwa utulivu) without being hit like a donkey" (boy, age twelve)

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When the teacher lets me use the library to read a story to change my thoughts a bit (nibadilishe mawazo) (girl, age thirteen)

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"When I can read the Holy Qur’an (Kurani takatifu), the hadith, and the names of Allah" (girl, age thirteen)

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Because the Qur’an is everything (boy, age eighteen)

Because the Qur’an is "the guide (muongozo) of our lives" (boy, age fifteen)

Here are some of my young interlocutors’ reasons for disliking attending school:

"School tires me because when one person misbehaves (atafanya ukorofi) or causes chaos (zogo) the whole class is punished" (girl, age twelve)

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"Because we are hit (tunapigwa mikwaju) and punished (tunaadhibiwa) everyday" (boy, age fourteen)

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Because other children laugh about me when I don’t understand something in class. They also exclude me because my school uniform is not nice. And I don’t have notebooks to write into, no bag, shoes and pens (girl, age thirteen)

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Because some days we don’t study or teachers teach somewhere else and come whenever they like (boy, age thirteen)

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Being caned (kupigwa mikwaju) (boy, age fifteen)

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"Being caned (kupigwa mikwaju) and hurting (kuumwa), sitting on the floor when reading, and the heat" (joto) (boy, age fourteen)

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Being hit without a reason (boy, age eleven)

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Receiving punishments that keep me from going to class when the teacher is teaching (girl, age thirteen)

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"Not being respected (kutoheshimiwa) by the teachers" (girl, age ten)

"The old and bad (kibovu) building; when it rains we all get wet" (boy, age eighteen)

Zanzibari students enjoy school/madrasa when they can study in quiet environments without being physically disciplined and feel free to learn and educate themselves with worldly and religious knowledge. They dislike the poor-quality infrastructure; being hit, bullied, or made fun of; being poor; or when they cannot study because teachers are absent. Both state primary schools and madrasas are central parts of Zanzibari children’s education, despite constituting differently structured spaces of knowledge transmission. Yet they are similar in the forms of discipline applied to correct children’s behavior. The use of corporal punishment through the cane (bakora; also, fimbo or mikwaju) to chastise children for perceived misbehavior is an ordinary practice in both settings. Although learning processes are central to childhood and socialization in Zanzibar, children’s fear of physical punishment is also intimately associated with education (Last 2000, 376). Understanding childhood as a realm of learning that is structured by specific spaces and knowledge emphasizes the complexity of children’s lives according to the meanings these spaces generate and their influence on childhood experiences.

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CHILDREN’S OWN DEPICTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS of chastisements and possible protections from them reflect a large variety of perspectives that illustrate the heterogeneous reality of young people’s experiences of violence and protection. As will be visible in the accounts of and perspectives on corporal punishment I collected from adults—whether teachers, parents, religious authorities, or child rights activists—many of both my young and older interlocutors’ accounts echoed each other, although others strongly disagreed with each other. The photograph by twelve-year-old Suhaila (see figure I.2) taken inside a Qur’anic school captures what appears to be an instance of physical chastisement. She wrote on the back of the photo that a child is being wronged (disciplined) through hitting, with no details added. Her descriptive commentary on the situation paired with her sympathy for the child being hit suggests both the normalcy and the condemnation many young Zanzibaris who spoke to me feel as they encounter physical chastisement in their educational environments on an everyday basis.

Yet other young people’s accounts reflected different emotional positions on the practice. A poem by Zuhura (age fifteen) goes as follows:

FIGURE I.2 "A child is being wronged (amekosewa) by being hit (kupigwa), (to be given adabu)." Photo by Suhaila, age twelve.

Zuhura’s critique of the effect of punishment on children’s lives reflects, from a young person’s angle, the persistent difficulties of determining the limits of appropriate discipline and the perceived challenges that young people face in their environments. The variety of written and visual elaborations on the notions of childhood, discipline, punishment, and safety by young people themselves put the discussions around child protection and corporal punishment in Zanzibar and beyond in a narrative frame that includes young people’s voices, which have so far been neglected.

Religion, Law, and Well-Being

Child protection begins by acknowledging that there are some practices that are harmful to young people and from which they need to be kept safe, regardless of where they live or what they believe. What differ are the narratives that are used to draw the boundaries between physical or psychological interference that is legitimate versus that which is not. In Zanzibar, child protection and religious belief and identity tend to be linked to each other. Religious narratives—and, in Zanzibar, 99 percent of the population identify as Muslims—are frequently used by adults to justify the continuation of physical chastisement as a form of discipline in the education system.

Even though there is no unifying and coherent Islamic stance on the acceptability of physical punishment in Zanzibar, there is a tendency to depict light caning and that restricted to a few strokes as a nonviolent and acceptable form