9. Punishment Discourses in Everyday Life

In chapter nine, ‘Punishment Discourses in Everyday Life’, Khum Raj Pathak is motivated by his insider knowledge as a student, then a teacher in Nepal to collect the stories of adults who suffered similar regimes of punishment. Working within a philosophical tradition he presents a powerful rhetorical argument about how violent languageconstructs punishment discourses, reminding us, through a flying visit to the British press, that such language is common in other cultures too, but may go unnoticed. In his narrative research he further explores the links between physical punishment and discourses of punishment and how together these disempower the individual who is punished.