Five video clips of brutal and illegal punishments administered by out-of-control police, prison or military personnel

If you find scenes of brutality particularly upsetting, you should not view these clips.

CLIP 1 OF 5: Paddling in a police station

This two-minute film is said to have been taken in a police station in Apodaca, Mexico. Mexico does not officially use corporal punishment. We do not know whether these police officers are just doing their own thing or if this is a standard (albeit illegal) practice to which the authorities turn a blind eye. Offenders are held in a bending position to receive a fairly severe paddling. The scene is rather chaotic and the picture quality is not very good.

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CLIP 2 OF 5: Falaka (bastinado) in the Iraqi military

This disturbing clip (1 minute 20 seconds) dates from the Saddam Hussein era, and indeed it is alleged that the person shown brutally whipping the soldiers here may be one of his sons, the sadistic psychopath and murderer Uday, who is thankfully now dead.

The whipping is applied to the soles of the feet, a traditional method in the Middle East known as Falaka, after the board used to hold up the recipient's feet. It is a very cruel and injurious form of CP.

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CLIP 3 OF 5: An illicit police slippering in Pakistan

This scene (32 seconds) is said to be taking place in a police station in Pakistan. A young man is spanked hard (though rather ineptly) with a shoe or slipper on his bare buttocks. It has been suggested that he was caught picking pockets in Lahore. Needless to say, although there is still some official JCP in Pakistan, the police are not supposed to do this of their own volition without due process, and it is to be deprecated.

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CLIP 4 OF 5: Illicit, brutal paddling in Venezuela

This clip (3 minutes 47 seconds) allegedly shows two thieves being punished extrajudicially in Venezuela by, it would appear, out-of-control police officers. This sort of thing sometimes happens in jurisdictions where the official legal system is not functioning properly.

The 2008 US State Department human rights report for Venezuela notes that the country currently features "harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detentions; a corrupt, inefficient, and politicized judicial system characterized by trial delays, impunity, and violations of due process" and "widespread corruption at all levels of government". It adds that "reports of beatings and humiliating treatment of suspects during arrests were common and involved various law enforcement agencies".

There is no official JCP in Venezuela, and no particular tradition of formal CP of any sort in the Spanish-speaking world in general, so it is quite surprising to see this rather Anglo-Saxon-style paddling, targeted quite precisely at the offender's bare buttocks.

The first offender receives seven strokes, and the second three strokes. At one point the person administering the paddling also hits the first prisoner's head.

The instrument used is absurdly long. The prisoners stand up facing the wall to receive their punishment, although they are not being kept there by any direct physical means. Maybe a gun is trained on them to make sure they stay in place. Or perhaps they have agreed to be paddled in exchange for not being formally charged and locked up.

Some of those present seem to be treating the event as an amusing entertainment, which lends a particularly distasteful tone to the proceedings. One vulgar idiot shouting annoyingly loud near the camera is pretending to be giving a "sports commentary", I'm told.

See also a Venezuelan blogger's comments on this (in Spanish), which shows that this video clip has been broadcast on TV, and describes the case as "police torture" in which a group of detainees were seriously mistreated.

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CLIP 5 OF 5: Mass prison paddling in Venezuela

In this much less harrowing clip (1 minute 40 seconds) we see a whole series of offenders being paddled with a boat oar or bat. The modus operandi is somewhat similar to that in the previous clip (though less brutal), but the setting here appears to be the yard of a reformatory or prison.

Each prisoner comes forward in turn, faces the wall, drops his underpants if he is not already naked, and receives two swats (or, in a couple of cases, three swats) on the bare buttocks.

There is a systematic, "production line" flavour to this, and one gets the impression that it is perhaps a routine event. One observer has suggested that this is a "welcome spanking" which all new prisoners automatically receive (cf. 18th-century Saxony, where every prisoner was flogged on arrival), but we have no corroboration for that.

Towards the end of this scene, a second officer takes over the job of paddling. The soundtrack is missing from the last part of the clip.

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