Okay, Ron. maybe I was a little obnoxious in my post. Sorry about that :-)

But it's really not so shocking that I was "abused" in your terms. It is in the background of many, many ethnic groups in America to smack around children when they misbehave. My mom's mom used a dishtowel braided into a club! These were traditional methods of punishment brought from Europe (I remember the towel had a special Yiddish name). Many of my friends of my age have similar things in their history; one of my best friends, whose father was black, used to be smacked with a belt. I got my mother's open hand and sometimes a wooden spoon. If you think this is shocking, ask other people between thirty and fifty and you'll get lots of similar stories; the idea that hitting your kids is horrible abuse did not become popular in this country until Dr. Spock's book was a hit.

I'm not coming down on one or another side of this issue because I do think it's better not to hit your children. But I'm not willing to condemn a huge number of mothers in America who came of age prior to the 1950s and say that most of us raised by those mothers should have been taken away from them.

Finally, my point was that you could not see her hands in the video. I don't know if what I saw was a smack or not. It's all up to the interpreter to supply what wasn't in the frame. I did see shaking, I saw that there were blows, but I could not see what kind of blows they were. It could have been a bunch of smacks with the figertips, and it could have been punching with the fist. All I'm saying is that I'm not willing to gamble that foster care is a better option than leaving her with her parents based on what might have been happening outside of the frame.