the way to punish children

we were in a group of seven person and in the classroom (TBA). There were different nationalities americans, corean, arabic people, haitian and congolese. We discussed about some topics but most of time we shared this topic. Personally, i found it very intersting to learn about other cultures. According to American people, beating a child it seems like a physical abuse and you can be arested for that. You don't have the right to beat a child. There are other way to punish a child like to private him/her to go out or to play with video games. Arabic people said that the father have all right to do anything he wants with his children ( except to kill them of course). Children depend from parents's opinions and must to obey to their instructions. If not it is a shame for the parents in the family and cannot tolerate that. I am congolese and in my culture parents prefer to prevent children before to take any form of punishment. But it also depends on what kind of errors children comitted. If it is not grave he will be prevented in order to change his/ her behavior. But if it is grave he/she will be corrected immediately. It is similar to corean people and haitian. In my country, the right of children or even human is almost not respected. So you can see a parent who beats his child even in the street. People don't care because there will not have the police to arest this parent. In brief you can beat your child in order to punish him/her but avoidind to kill him/her because in this case you can be arested. I think children sometimes need to be beaten in order to change their bad behavior because sometime reprochs are not enough to change them.