Tawse Tawse The tawse, sometimes formerly spelled taws (the plural of Scots taw, a thong of a whip) is an implement used for corporal punishment. It was used for educational discipline, primarily in Scotland, but also in schools in the English cities of Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, Manchester and Walsall. A tawse consists of a strip of leather, with one end split into a number of tails. The thickness of the leather and the number of tails is variable. Many Scottish saddlers made tawses for local schoolmasters. The official name "tawse" was hardly ever used in conversation by either teachers or
Corporal punishment in the home factors. Joan Durrant and Ron Ensom write that "Together, results consistently suggest that physical punishment has a direct causal effect on externalizing behavior, whether through a reflexive response to pain, modeling, or coercive family processes". No peer-reviewed research has shown improvements in developmental health as a result of parents' use of corporal punishment. Randomized controlled trials, the benchmark for establishing causality, are not commonly used for studying physical punishment because of ethical constraints against deliberately causing pain to study participants. However, one existing randomized controlled trial did demonstrate that a in harsh physical punishment was followed by a significant drop