Editing Birching (section)

==History==
[[File:Women&#039;s prison punishment (early modern era).jpg|thumb|Birching in a women's prison, US ({{circa|1890}})]]
[[File:'February - Cutting Weather - Squally' - George Cruikshank, 1839 - BL.jpg|thumb|1839 caricature by [[George Cruikshank]] of a school flogging]]
[[File:Edmund Bonner punishing a heretic.jpg|thumb|[[Edmund Bonner]] punishing a heretic in [[Foxe's Book of Martyrs]] (1563)]]

It was the most common [[School corporal punishment|school]] and [[Judicial corporal punishment|judicial punishment]] in Europe up to the mid-19th century, when [[caning]] gained increasing popularity. According to some accounts, even the legendary sting of the [[cat o' nine tails]] was less feared than the birch in certain prisons. The birch was always applied to the bare [[buttocks]] (as also on the Continent), a humiliation usually befalling boys (like the [[Cat o' nine tails#Boys' punishment|boy's cat]], likewise on the naked posterior), the 'adult' cat to the back or shoulders of adults; although in the 20th century, judges increasingly ordered the birch rather than the cat, even for robbery with violence (the only offence for which adult judicial corporal punishment was ordered in the latter decades of its use in mainland Britain).

Birching was also featured in the French Revolution. One leader of the revolution, [[Theroigne de Mericourt|Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt]], went mad, ending her days in an asylum after a public birching. On 31 May 1793 the [[Jacobin (politics)|Jacobin]] women seized her, stripped her naked, and flogged her on the bare bottom in the public garden of the [[Tuileries]].<ref>Roudinesco, Elisabeth. (1992) ''Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends of Theroigne de Mericourt'', Verso, p.198. {{ISBN|0-86091-597-2}}</ref>
Judicial birching in 20th-century Britain was used much more often as a fairly minor punishment for male juveniles, typically for petty larceny, rather than as a serious penalty for adult men. This was applied to boys aged up to 14 in England and Wales, and up to 16 in Scotland. In this juvenile version, the birch was much lighter and smaller, and the birch was administered privately by a policeman, usually immediately after the magistrate's court hearing, either in a room in the court building or at the nearest police station.

In [[Lewis Carroll]]'s early poem ''The Two Brothers'', 1853, one laments: "Oh would I were back at [[Twyford School]], Learning lessons in fear of the birch!" as his sadistic brother uses him as fish bait.

Today birching is rarely used as a judicial punishment, and it has also almost completely died out as a punishment for children.

In the United Kingdom, birching as a judicial penalty, in both its juvenile and adult versions, was abolished in 1948, but it was retained until 1962 as a punishment for violent breaches of prison discipline. The punishment of Birching and cat o' nine tails continued to be used in [[Northern Ireland]] into the 1940s.<ref>MacEoin, Uinseann (1997), ''The IRA in the twilight years 1923-1948'', Argenta Publications, Dublin, pg 456, ISBN 0951117246</ref>

The [[Isle of Man]] caused a good deal of controversy by continuing to birch young offenders until 1976.<ref>[https://www.corpun.com/manx.htm "Birching in the Isle of Man 1945 to 1976"], article at World Corporal Punishment Research.</ref><ref>''[[Tyrer v. the United Kingdom]]''</ref> The birch was also used on offending teenage boys until the mid-1960s on the [[Channel Islands]] of [[Guernsey]] and [[Jersey]].

In [[Trinidad and Tobago]], the Corporal Punishment Act 1953 allows the High Court to order males, in addition to another punishment (often concurrent with a prison term), to undergo corporal punishment in the form of either a 'flogging' with a knotted [[cat o' nine tails]] (made of cords, as in the Royal Navy tradition) or a 'whipping' with a 'rod' [i.e. switch] of [[tamarind]], birch or other switches, and it allows the President to approve other instruments; in 2000, the minimum age was raised from 16 to 18, the legal threshold of adulthood. It may now be the only country in the world still officially using the birch.