A corporal punishment or a physical punishment is a punishment which is intended to cause physical pain to a person. When it is inflicted on minors, especially in home and school settings, its methods may include spanking or paddling. When it is inflicted on adults, it may be inflicted on prisoners and slaves, and can involve methods such as whipping with a belt or a horsewhip.

Physical punishments for crimes or injuries, including floggings, brandings, and even mutilations, were practised in most civilizations since ancient times. They have increasingly been viewed as inhumane since the development of humanitarianism ideals after the Enlightenment, especially in the Western world. By the late 20th century, corporal punishment was eliminated from the legal systems of most developed countries.

The legality of corporal punishment in various settings differs by jurisdiction. Internationally, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw the application of human rights law to the question of corporal punishment in several contexts:

In many Western countries, medical and human rights organizations oppose the corporal punishment of children. Campaigns against corporal punishment have aimed to bring about legal reforms to ban the use of corporal punishment against minors in homes and schools.

Author Jared Diamond writes that hunter-gatherer societies have tended to use little corporal punishment, whereas agricultural and industrial societies tend to use progressively more of it. Diamond suggests this may be because hunter-gatherers tend to have few valuable physical possessions, and misbehavior of the child would not cause harm to others' property.

Researchers who have lived among the Parakanã and Ju/'hoansi people, as well as some Aboriginal Australians, have written about the absence of the physical punishment of children in those cultures.

Wilson writes:

Probably the only generalization that can be made about the use of physical punishment among primitive tribes is that there was no common procedure [...] Pettit concludes that among primitive societies corporal punishment is rare, not because of the innate kindliness of these people but because it is contrary to developing the type of individual personality they set up as their ideal [...] An important point to be made here is that we cannot state that physical punishment as a motivational or corrective device is 'innate' to man.