When Women Were Whipped.
Throughout history corporal punishment has consistently been regarded as the simplest and most effective means of maintaining discipline and enforcing law and order. Both men and women have endured this form of punishment, but it has always been held in especial favour for the correction of females. There are two possible reasons for this. Firstly, the female anatomy, with its broad hips and well-fleshed buttocks, is particularly suited to receive chastisement. Secondly, as corporal punishment normally requires some degree of nudity, this provides an added humiliation to the woman, whilst affording a pleasant spectacle to the onlookers.
In Anglo-Saxon England whipping was favoured as one of the ‘gentler’ punishments for traditional female crimes such as pilfering, drunkenness, prostitution and fortune-telling. Guilty women were dragged through the streets, naked, behind a cart before the actual whipping began. The Anglo-Saxon whip consisted of three cords, knotted at the ends, and the normal procedure at the whipping post entailed a flogging till the skin was broken. Despite its severity, if a woman was sentenced to a flogging she could count herself lucky for other punishments were far more terrible. The borough customs of Portsmouth, for example, directed that if a woman was convicted of theft ‘her tetys shall be kyt off at Chalcross’! A serious offence could result in a woman being stripped and torn apart by four horses, as illustrated in Lucas van Leyden’s drawing in the Uffizi Palace, Florence.
Those who were at the bottom of the social scale fared worst. Female serfs in particular were treated harshly for the slightest offence. In one 10th century church record we read how the maidservant of Teothic, the bellmaker of Winchester was ‘for a slight offence’ placed in chains and hung up by the hands and feet all night. In the morning she was unchained and beaten unmercifully then fettered once more for the night. The punishment continued until the girl was able to make her escape.
Prostitution was always considered a serious crime. In early Medieval France prostitutes were pilloried, flogged and subjected to painful indignities. Cases occurred of a procuress being exposed naked all day to the multitude, and then her body hair burned off with a flaming torch. Others were chased naked through the streets and pelted with filth. One favourite humiliation was to set the unfortunate woman nude on the back of an ass, facing the a****l’s hindquarters, and whip her through the town to the jibes and jeers of the drooling public. During the late 12th century, King Alphonso IX of Castile ordered that if a woman was found guilty of procuring, she should be publicly whipped and have all her clothes destroyed.
In the later Middle Ages in England it was the custom for prostitutes to be punished by some sort of public humiliation, such as having her hair cropped, being fastened naked or half-dressed in the pillory or stocks, paraded in a cart, or placed on a ducking stool.
Another group which suffered from constant victimisation were the gypsies. They had begun migrating from India about 1000 AD and by the end of the Middle Ages they had spread into all parts of Europe. Suspicion of these wanderers soon gave way to violent hostility.
In the accounts of the Provost of Paris in the 15th century, details are found of the severe physical punishment of a young girl who had consulted a gypsy woman about the possible time of her father’s death. Throughout Europe the gypsies themselves were being persecuted — their men hanged, their women flogged. In Moldavia and Walachia gypsy women were put into prison camps at the foot of the mountains to work as gold-washers, where they were compelled to labour completely naked in the ice-cold torrents of the mountain rivers, driven on by the lashes of a whip across their shoulders.
In England the laws relating to vagabonds were tightened up. A statute passed in 1530, during the reign of Henry VIII, laid down that both male and female vagrants were to be ‘stripped naked and whipped at the end of a cart until the whole body be bloody’. No one was spared. Young girls, aged women, even ‘distracted women’ were flogged. Those who had smallpox were flogged, those who begged for bread were flogged; they were flogged for every conceivable cause — just so that they should go elsewhere and beg. This statute remained in force until the 39th year of Elizabeth I’s reign, when a new law was passed requiring offenders merely to be stripped to the waist, and at the same time setting up whipping posts in all parts of the country.
Elizabeth’s reign also saw the founding of bridewells throughout the nation, to which vagrants and other lawbreakers were sent. On arrival every adult offender received 12 strokes of the whip, and every c***d 6 strokes, ‘and the party that shall receive this punishment shall have his or her clothes turned off their shoulders to the bare skin down to the waist’. It was specified that the whips used should be made of two cords without knots.
At this time women in prisons and bridewells were not segregated from men, even if they were pregnant or with babes at the breast. Most of the women were half-naked because their clothes had worn out, and newcomers were often stripped to the buff by other inmates, who sold the clothing for drink.
By about 1600 it was becoming a popular entertainment to visit the local bridewell to watch erring girls and women —usually prostitutes — being whipped. A special tip to the warden ensured that some of the more attractive and youthful whores would be selected. Once in the punishment hall, the girls were stripped by the male guards and placed, stark naked, under a wooden stockade in which their wrists could be secured well above the prisoners’ heads. The beatings would be administered by one or more of the guards using a stiff rod. The young women, their backs and buttocks covered in welts and bruises, were then dressed with deliberate clumsiness and returned to their communal cells.
In 1677 a balustraded gallery was erected in London’s bridewell for the benefit of members of the public attending these exhibitions. The practice continued for almost another century. Eighteenth century débutantes used to make up ‘flogging parties’ to watch the whores beaten. By this time the women were only stripped to the waist, but they were now flogged with a bull’s pizzle or a birch which had been steeped beforehand in vinegar and brine. However, by bribing the warden, private arrangements could still be made to have the girls flogged on the bare buttocks.
The late 17th century was the heyday of corporal punishment in England. Right across the land, men and women were whipped unmercifully for trivial offences such as peddling, being drunk on a Sunday, and participating in a riot. This was the age of Judge Jeffreys and his Bloody Assize. Jeffreys revelled in his work, and took particular pleasure in sentencing female offenders. On one occasion he is reported as saying: ‘Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man. Scourge her till the blood runs down! It is Christmas, a cold time for madam to strip. See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!’
One section of the community which came under constant attack during this period were the Quakers, who were constantly sentenced to be flogged at the whipping post or the cart’s tail. Barbara Blaugdon was punished for delivering an address in the church at Great Torrington in Devon. She was lodged for a night among a great company of gypsies in Exeter prison, and the next day the sheriff came with a beadle who whipped her with extreme cruelty. Nowhere was this persecution carried out with greater enthusiasm than in the American colonies. In Boston in 1657 Mary Clark, after preaching unlawfully, received 20 stripes from a whip of thick cords knotted at the ends. At Dover, New England, in 1662, Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose were sentenced to be whipped through several towns at the cart’s tail. It was the middle of winter, and the snow lay on the ground, but the three unfortunate women were still stripped for the punishment. Anne Coleman was arrested on a later occasion at Salem. During her subsequent punishment her breasts were also whipped, causing her excruciating suffering. In 1664 her two friends were pilloried and whipped in Virginia. This time the instrument used was a cat-of-nine-tails.
Around this period a curious form of chastisement was used in some convents of the Roman Catholic Church. Whilst the usual discipline was a scourging on the body naked to the girdle, in many convents the nuns were compelled to receive their correction entirely naked. Usually they were beaten on their backs, but at times they were required to present the front of their bodies to the birch. In Spain Father Milgrida carried out this practice of frontal flagellation to a far greater extent by introducing it among the young ladies of the court. In the ante-rooms, it was said, the beautiful sinners were to be seen on their knees at prayers, and upon a signal being given, they removed such portions of their clothing as was necessary and were beaten on their breasts and pubic regions. Some historians suggest that the Spanish queen herself submitted to this discipline.
In the eighteenth century, women were still being publicly flogged in England. The following account, taken from the city records of Bristol for 1704 is a typical example:
‘Maria Pritchard, for a cheat, in taking three yards of dowlas from Mr Rishton in the name of Alderman Swymmer, to be stripped naked to the waist on Friday morning next, and whipped from the Tolzey, down one side of High Street and up the other, between the hours of 12 and 1 o’clock.’
The whipping of prostitutes through the streets of London occurred as late as 1740. There was an organisation of snoopers called the Society for the Reformation of Manners, who considered it their duty to report such women to the authorities. The last recorded instance of a public whipping for a female in Great Britain was in Scotland in 1817. The young woman’s crime was drunkenness and she was whipped through the streets of Inverness on three separate occasions. It was not until 1820 that corporal punishment for women was finally abolished as a judicial penalty.
But while the whipping of females was on the wane in this country, it was still strongly enforced abroad. In France in 1786 the beautiful Countess de la Motte, for her involvement in the affair of the Queen’s Diamonds, was sentenced to be taken to a public place with a halter around her neck, there to be flogged naked with rods and branded on both shoulders with a hot iron, and finally confined in prison for the rest of her life. As usual in those days, the Countess did not hear the sentence until it was just about to be executed. She was brought to the scene in a state of undress, and while the sentence was being read out she broke out into a stream of curses and vituperation against her accusers. She was seized, fastened to a cart and whipped according to the terms of the sentence, but the latter part of her punishment was badly mismanaged. Due to her frantic struggles, the executioner explained later, he was unable to secure her shoulders properly, so her breasts were branded instead!
The whipping of women in France was not always done according to law. In the town of Montbrison during the Revolution a ‘tree of liberty’ was cleared of its lower limbs and women were tied to it, stripped, and scourged. A girl of fifteen, the daughter of a revolutionary who had been killed, was whipped at this tree and made to kiss her father’s corpse, because she had lain with a palace guard to save her own skin. When order was restored in that area by the Jeunesse Doree, this same young girl was rearrested, stripped, and scourged again for the crime of kissing the corpse!
In Sweden at this time, men accused of adultery received 120 blows with a stick; adulterous women were sentenced to 90 lashes of the whip. The Swedes, however, showed a certain charity towards women criminals. Female offenders had their breasts and abdomen protected by a sheeting of copper. This was a significant concession, and not for reasons of modesty; for part of the traditional ‘fun’ for spectators at a public whipping was achieved by allowing the tail of the lash to curl around the body to strike the naked breasts of the helplessly pinioned victim.
The Russians, who in many ways were masters of corporal punishment, actually approved of breast-whipping as a mode of correcting female serfs. Birches (rozgi) were commonly employed, though harsher landowners favoured the plet — a whip made of three strips of rawhide, often tipped with small leaden balls. Though obviously unpleasant, such punishment was presumably still preferable to other standard methods of punishing serfs, such as being cast naked into the bear-pit or set upon by wolves.
The most notorious instrument of punishment in Russia was the knout, said to have been introduced by Ivan III. There were several versions of the knout. One, described by M. de la Motraye, was a ‘heavy leather thong eight feet in length, attached to a handle two feet long; the last being about the breadth of a broad tape, and curved, so as to give two sharp edges along its entire length’. Other accounts describe the knout as plaited thongs interwoven with wire. By all accounts it was a fearsome instrument.
When the prison reformer John Howard was in St Petersburg he saw two criminals, a man and a woman, suffer the punishment of the knout. According to Howard: ‘The woman was taken first, and after being roughly stripped to the waist, her hands and feet were bound with cords to a post made for the purpose. A servant attended the execution, and both he and his master were stout men. The servant first marked the ground and struck the woman five times on the back; every stroke seemed to penetrate deep into her flesh; but his master, thinking him too gentle, pushed him aside, took his place, and gave all the remaining strokes himself, which were evidently more severe. The woman received 25 blows and the man 60.’
No one in Russia was safe from the knout. Peter the Great sentenced the Empress Eudoxia to be flogged and imprisoned because he suspected her of infidelity. Another celebrated case was that of the Countess Lopukhina (Lapuchin). Natalia Lopukhina, a young and beautiful aristocrat at the court of the Empress Elizabeth was implicated in a case of alleged treason involving a foreign diplomat. On 31st May 1744 the alleged conspirators were executed by being broken on the wheel in St Petersburg. Lopukhina herself, in the presence of a large crowd of interested onlookers was stripped, hung by her wrists and flogged until every inch of skin was flayed from her exposed body, back and front. Afterwards, her tongue was torn out and she was exiled to Siberia. It is likely that the Empress derived considerable satisfaction from this cruel punishment, for she was intensely jealous of Lopukhina’s beauty. The knout continued in use until 1845 when it was officially replaced by the plet.
Despite a dramatic decline in the judicial use of corporal punishment during the last century it still survives in many countries today, notably South Africa (Namibia), various Islamic states, and other Third World countries. Soviet Russia, too, is loathe to abandon the old ways. In his autobiography, Sergei Kourdakov, who worked for the Soviet police before his defection to America, gives an interesting insight into their methods. On one occasion he and his companions broke up an open air baptismal service, stripping the worshippers and beating them with batons…
‘We then turned to the women and girls. Stripped naked, the girls crouched down on the beach, trying to hide themselves in shame. We prodded them and laughed at them and said, ‘So this is what Believers look like!’ The older women bowed their heads and sobbed as we taunted the frightened, beaten young girls. Then we marched off, pushing the Believers to the police truck. Many of them were sobbing as they walked.’
Sergei describes the journey to the police station, and the humiliation of the captives. ‘It was still quite light, and the people could see the police truck driving past with the nude girls crouched down, being prodded by the men sitting in the back.’
Another time, Sergei led a raid on a secret religious meeting, and found a girl he had come across before…
‘I picked her up and flung her on a table face down. Two of us stripped her clothes off One of my men held her down and I began to beat her with my open hand as hard as I could, hitting her again and again. My hand began to sting under the blows. Her skin started to blister. She moaned but fought desperately not to cry. At last she gave in and began sobbing. When I was so exhausted I couldn’t raise my arm for even one more blow, and her backside was a mass of raw flesh, I pushed her off the table and she collapsed on the floor.’
It seems that corporal punishment, as a legitimate sanction by the state, is not yet dead!
http://spankingmagstories.blogspot.com/2020/03/when-women-were-whipped.html?m=1&zx=ca387976e7092ca
In Anglo-Saxon England whipping was favoured as one of the ‘gentler’ punishments for traditional female crimes such as pilfering, drunkenness, prostitution and fortune-telling. Guilty women were dragged through the streets, naked, behind a cart before the actual whipping began. The Anglo-Saxon whip consisted of three cords, knotted at the ends, and the normal procedure at the whipping post entailed a flogging till the skin was broken. Despite its severity, if a woman was sentenced to a flogging she could count herself lucky for other punishments were far more terrible. The borough customs of Portsmouth, for example, directed that if a woman was convicted of theft ‘her tetys shall be kyt off at Chalcross’! A serious offence could result in a woman being stripped and torn apart by four horses, as illustrated in Lucas van Leyden’s drawing in the Uffizi Palace, Florence.
Those who were at the bottom of the social scale fared worst. Female serfs in particular were treated harshly for the slightest offence. In one 10th century church record we read how the maidservant of Teothic, the bellmaker of Winchester was ‘for a slight offence’ placed in chains and hung up by the hands and feet all night. In the morning she was unchained and beaten unmercifully then fettered once more for the night. The punishment continued until the girl was able to make her escape.
Prostitution was always considered a serious crime. In early Medieval France prostitutes were pilloried, flogged and subjected to painful indignities. Cases occurred of a procuress being exposed naked all day to the multitude, and then her body hair burned off with a flaming torch. Others were chased naked through the streets and pelted with filth. One favourite humiliation was to set the unfortunate woman nude on the back of an ass, facing the a****l’s hindquarters, and whip her through the town to the jibes and jeers of the drooling public. During the late 12th century, King Alphonso IX of Castile ordered that if a woman was found guilty of procuring, she should be publicly whipped and have all her clothes destroyed.
In the later Middle Ages in England it was the custom for prostitutes to be punished by some sort of public humiliation, such as having her hair cropped, being fastened naked or half-dressed in the pillory or stocks, paraded in a cart, or placed on a ducking stool.
Another group which suffered from constant victimisation were the gypsies. They had begun migrating from India about 1000 AD and by the end of the Middle Ages they had spread into all parts of Europe. Suspicion of these wanderers soon gave way to violent hostility.
In the accounts of the Provost of Paris in the 15th century, details are found of the severe physical punishment of a young girl who had consulted a gypsy woman about the possible time of her father’s death. Throughout Europe the gypsies themselves were being persecuted — their men hanged, their women flogged. In Moldavia and Walachia gypsy women were put into prison camps at the foot of the mountains to work as gold-washers, where they were compelled to labour completely naked in the ice-cold torrents of the mountain rivers, driven on by the lashes of a whip across their shoulders.
In England the laws relating to vagabonds were tightened up. A statute passed in 1530, during the reign of Henry VIII, laid down that both male and female vagrants were to be ‘stripped naked and whipped at the end of a cart until the whole body be bloody’. No one was spared. Young girls, aged women, even ‘distracted women’ were flogged. Those who had smallpox were flogged, those who begged for bread were flogged; they were flogged for every conceivable cause — just so that they should go elsewhere and beg. This statute remained in force until the 39th year of Elizabeth I’s reign, when a new law was passed requiring offenders merely to be stripped to the waist, and at the same time setting up whipping posts in all parts of the country.
Elizabeth’s reign also saw the founding of bridewells throughout the nation, to which vagrants and other lawbreakers were sent. On arrival every adult offender received 12 strokes of the whip, and every c***d 6 strokes, ‘and the party that shall receive this punishment shall have his or her clothes turned off their shoulders to the bare skin down to the waist’. It was specified that the whips used should be made of two cords without knots.
At this time women in prisons and bridewells were not segregated from men, even if they were pregnant or with babes at the breast. Most of the women were half-naked because their clothes had worn out, and newcomers were often stripped to the buff by other inmates, who sold the clothing for drink.
By about 1600 it was becoming a popular entertainment to visit the local bridewell to watch erring girls and women —usually prostitutes — being whipped. A special tip to the warden ensured that some of the more attractive and youthful whores would be selected. Once in the punishment hall, the girls were stripped by the male guards and placed, stark naked, under a wooden stockade in which their wrists could be secured well above the prisoners’ heads. The beatings would be administered by one or more of the guards using a stiff rod. The young women, their backs and buttocks covered in welts and bruises, were then dressed with deliberate clumsiness and returned to their communal cells.
In 1677 a balustraded gallery was erected in London’s bridewell for the benefit of members of the public attending these exhibitions. The practice continued for almost another century. Eighteenth century débutantes used to make up ‘flogging parties’ to watch the whores beaten. By this time the women were only stripped to the waist, but they were now flogged with a bull’s pizzle or a birch which had been steeped beforehand in vinegar and brine. However, by bribing the warden, private arrangements could still be made to have the girls flogged on the bare buttocks.
The late 17th century was the heyday of corporal punishment in England. Right across the land, men and women were whipped unmercifully for trivial offences such as peddling, being drunk on a Sunday, and participating in a riot. This was the age of Judge Jeffreys and his Bloody Assize. Jeffreys revelled in his work, and took particular pleasure in sentencing female offenders. On one occasion he is reported as saying: ‘Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man. Scourge her till the blood runs down! It is Christmas, a cold time for madam to strip. See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!’
One section of the community which came under constant attack during this period were the Quakers, who were constantly sentenced to be flogged at the whipping post or the cart’s tail. Barbara Blaugdon was punished for delivering an address in the church at Great Torrington in Devon. She was lodged for a night among a great company of gypsies in Exeter prison, and the next day the sheriff came with a beadle who whipped her with extreme cruelty. Nowhere was this persecution carried out with greater enthusiasm than in the American colonies. In Boston in 1657 Mary Clark, after preaching unlawfully, received 20 stripes from a whip of thick cords knotted at the ends. At Dover, New England, in 1662, Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose were sentenced to be whipped through several towns at the cart’s tail. It was the middle of winter, and the snow lay on the ground, but the three unfortunate women were still stripped for the punishment. Anne Coleman was arrested on a later occasion at Salem. During her subsequent punishment her breasts were also whipped, causing her excruciating suffering. In 1664 her two friends were pilloried and whipped in Virginia. This time the instrument used was a cat-of-nine-tails.
Around this period a curious form of chastisement was used in some convents of the Roman Catholic Church. Whilst the usual discipline was a scourging on the body naked to the girdle, in many convents the nuns were compelled to receive their correction entirely naked. Usually they were beaten on their backs, but at times they were required to present the front of their bodies to the birch. In Spain Father Milgrida carried out this practice of frontal flagellation to a far greater extent by introducing it among the young ladies of the court. In the ante-rooms, it was said, the beautiful sinners were to be seen on their knees at prayers, and upon a signal being given, they removed such portions of their clothing as was necessary and were beaten on their breasts and pubic regions. Some historians suggest that the Spanish queen herself submitted to this discipline.
In the eighteenth century, women were still being publicly flogged in England. The following account, taken from the city records of Bristol for 1704 is a typical example:
‘Maria Pritchard, for a cheat, in taking three yards of dowlas from Mr Rishton in the name of Alderman Swymmer, to be stripped naked to the waist on Friday morning next, and whipped from the Tolzey, down one side of High Street and up the other, between the hours of 12 and 1 o’clock.’
The whipping of prostitutes through the streets of London occurred as late as 1740. There was an organisation of snoopers called the Society for the Reformation of Manners, who considered it their duty to report such women to the authorities. The last recorded instance of a public whipping for a female in Great Britain was in Scotland in 1817. The young woman’s crime was drunkenness and she was whipped through the streets of Inverness on three separate occasions. It was not until 1820 that corporal punishment for women was finally abolished as a judicial penalty.
But while the whipping of females was on the wane in this country, it was still strongly enforced abroad. In France in 1786 the beautiful Countess de la Motte, for her involvement in the affair of the Queen’s Diamonds, was sentenced to be taken to a public place with a halter around her neck, there to be flogged naked with rods and branded on both shoulders with a hot iron, and finally confined in prison for the rest of her life. As usual in those days, the Countess did not hear the sentence until it was just about to be executed. She was brought to the scene in a state of undress, and while the sentence was being read out she broke out into a stream of curses and vituperation against her accusers. She was seized, fastened to a cart and whipped according to the terms of the sentence, but the latter part of her punishment was badly mismanaged. Due to her frantic struggles, the executioner explained later, he was unable to secure her shoulders properly, so her breasts were branded instead!
The whipping of women in France was not always done according to law. In the town of Montbrison during the Revolution a ‘tree of liberty’ was cleared of its lower limbs and women were tied to it, stripped, and scourged. A girl of fifteen, the daughter of a revolutionary who had been killed, was whipped at this tree and made to kiss her father’s corpse, because she had lain with a palace guard to save her own skin. When order was restored in that area by the Jeunesse Doree, this same young girl was rearrested, stripped, and scourged again for the crime of kissing the corpse!
In Sweden at this time, men accused of adultery received 120 blows with a stick; adulterous women were sentenced to 90 lashes of the whip. The Swedes, however, showed a certain charity towards women criminals. Female offenders had their breasts and abdomen protected by a sheeting of copper. This was a significant concession, and not for reasons of modesty; for part of the traditional ‘fun’ for spectators at a public whipping was achieved by allowing the tail of the lash to curl around the body to strike the naked breasts of the helplessly pinioned victim.
The Russians, who in many ways were masters of corporal punishment, actually approved of breast-whipping as a mode of correcting female serfs. Birches (rozgi) were commonly employed, though harsher landowners favoured the plet — a whip made of three strips of rawhide, often tipped with small leaden balls. Though obviously unpleasant, such punishment was presumably still preferable to other standard methods of punishing serfs, such as being cast naked into the bear-pit or set upon by wolves.
The most notorious instrument of punishment in Russia was the knout, said to have been introduced by Ivan III. There were several versions of the knout. One, described by M. de la Motraye, was a ‘heavy leather thong eight feet in length, attached to a handle two feet long; the last being about the breadth of a broad tape, and curved, so as to give two sharp edges along its entire length’. Other accounts describe the knout as plaited thongs interwoven with wire. By all accounts it was a fearsome instrument.
When the prison reformer John Howard was in St Petersburg he saw two criminals, a man and a woman, suffer the punishment of the knout. According to Howard: ‘The woman was taken first, and after being roughly stripped to the waist, her hands and feet were bound with cords to a post made for the purpose. A servant attended the execution, and both he and his master were stout men. The servant first marked the ground and struck the woman five times on the back; every stroke seemed to penetrate deep into her flesh; but his master, thinking him too gentle, pushed him aside, took his place, and gave all the remaining strokes himself, which were evidently more severe. The woman received 25 blows and the man 60.’
No one in Russia was safe from the knout. Peter the Great sentenced the Empress Eudoxia to be flogged and imprisoned because he suspected her of infidelity. Another celebrated case was that of the Countess Lopukhina (Lapuchin). Natalia Lopukhina, a young and beautiful aristocrat at the court of the Empress Elizabeth was implicated in a case of alleged treason involving a foreign diplomat. On 31st May 1744 the alleged conspirators were executed by being broken on the wheel in St Petersburg. Lopukhina herself, in the presence of a large crowd of interested onlookers was stripped, hung by her wrists and flogged until every inch of skin was flayed from her exposed body, back and front. Afterwards, her tongue was torn out and she was exiled to Siberia. It is likely that the Empress derived considerable satisfaction from this cruel punishment, for she was intensely jealous of Lopukhina’s beauty. The knout continued in use until 1845 when it was officially replaced by the plet.
Despite a dramatic decline in the judicial use of corporal punishment during the last century it still survives in many countries today, notably South Africa (Namibia), various Islamic states, and other Third World countries. Soviet Russia, too, is loathe to abandon the old ways. In his autobiography, Sergei Kourdakov, who worked for the Soviet police before his defection to America, gives an interesting insight into their methods. On one occasion he and his companions broke up an open air baptismal service, stripping the worshippers and beating them with batons…
‘We then turned to the women and girls. Stripped naked, the girls crouched down on the beach, trying to hide themselves in shame. We prodded them and laughed at them and said, ‘So this is what Believers look like!’ The older women bowed their heads and sobbed as we taunted the frightened, beaten young girls. Then we marched off, pushing the Believers to the police truck. Many of them were sobbing as they walked.’
Sergei describes the journey to the police station, and the humiliation of the captives. ‘It was still quite light, and the people could see the police truck driving past with the nude girls crouched down, being prodded by the men sitting in the back.’
Another time, Sergei led a raid on a secret religious meeting, and found a girl he had come across before…
‘I picked her up and flung her on a table face down. Two of us stripped her clothes off One of my men held her down and I began to beat her with my open hand as hard as I could, hitting her again and again. My hand began to sting under the blows. Her skin started to blister. She moaned but fought desperately not to cry. At last she gave in and began sobbing. When I was so exhausted I couldn’t raise my arm for even one more blow, and her backside was a mass of raw flesh, I pushed her off the table and she collapsed on the floor.’
It seems that corporal punishment, as a legitimate sanction by the state, is not yet dead!
http://spankingmagstories.blogspot.com/2020/03/when-women-were-whipped.html?m=1&zx=ca387976e7092ca
4 年 前
