statute books and use both capital and corporal punishment. We heard the minister responsible for public safety, Mr. Quinton Edness, saying that he had received enormous public support for his recent suggestion of using flogging.

Whenever there is a particularly vicious murder or an especially nasty crime of violence in Bermuda, people begin to suggest hanging and flogging as a means of preventing crimes of violence. That is a natural emotional response to revolting crimes. It is also, of course, revenge..."Give them a taste of their own medicine.'' These suggestions are made even though it seems clear that violence results in more violence. There is no evidence to show that meeting violence with violence actually reduces the instances of violent crime, quite the contrary. Sanctioned violence against people often produces very angry and very violent people.

We also have to remember that whipping people is a symptom of a barbaric society with heavy implications of slave masters and abused slaves. No society can claim to be civilised if it agrees to sink to the lowest level of its base instincts. Civilised societies seek dignity and the common good.

Very often these days we are sympathetic when we hear people who are charged with sexual offences say that they were sexually abused as children. If you put an angry and anti-social young man in jail and flog him, you are going to get back someone who is even more angry and more anti-social and determined to seek revenge. You are very unlikely to get back a reformed offender. Is that what we want? Do we want to create angry and violent people and then release them from prison onto an unsuspecting public? It is perfectly true that very often today people seek to excuse their anti-social behaviour by claiming that they were victims of this that or the other. Far too often we accept that we live in a society where it is fashionable to be a victim and to live by the rules of television talk shows and not by the rules of society.

We should be careful to take responsibility for our own actions and not to fall into the trap of excuses because we are all victims of one thing or another. As a society we have a right to ask people to behave responsibly but we also have a responsibility to offer help. Flogging is not and never will be rehabilitation.

We have to be careful not to create victims or to reinforce anti-social behaviour. If killing and violence are wrong, and they are wrong, then they are just as wrong when undertaken by the state as they are when undertaken by individuals.