We have a dark spot on in our history.
The home for naughty women located on Sprogoe - an lsland in the Great Belt. Today you pass it when you use the brigde over the Great Belt but between 1923 and 1961 the island was without connection to the mainland and it was used to house women who were either pregnant outside marriage or just young girls trying to escape abuse at home.
The danish Lester Roloff was called Christian Keller and he ran two homes - one for young men and the one on Sprogoe. They were named "the Kelllerske facilities".
We never had a tradition for paddling. A teacher would use his hands to slap a student on the cheek or his ruler to hit the fingers, but this facility had isolation rooms (without music - just quietness.)
Beside the isolation rooms, they used belt and straight jackets to control its patients. Often the girls were sterilized before leaving the facility so they would not get pregnant with the first man they could meet once released.
It was an isolated place but some fishermen found their wife when they landed on the island covered by darkness and removed a girl or two from the island in order to marry them quickly. Regardless of how few teeth the fishermen had, the women often found it being married to an old distasteful man easier than remaining on the island, and followed them willingly.
Picture from a boatThe homes are now history but if we dont know our history we would not learn from it.