EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (AP) — Adrian Peterson is coming back to the Minnesota Vikings less than a week after he was charged with child abuse for using a wooden switch to spank his 4-year-old son. 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 7, 2014, file photo, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson warms up for an NFL football game against the St. Louis Rams in St. Louis. The Vikings benched Peterson for Sunday's... (Associated Press) 
 
 This photo provided by the Montgomery County sheriff’s office shows the booking photo of Adrian Peterson. Peterson was indicted in Texas for using a branch to spank one of his sons and the Minnesota... (Associated Press) 
 
 Peterson, considered one of the best running backs in the NFL, was benched for Sunday's 30-7 home loss to the New England. Vikings owners Zygi and Mark Wilf said Monday they had decided to bring back Peterson for practices and Sunday's game at New Orleans "after significant thought, discussion and consideration." 
 
 The Wilfs say they want to let the legal process play out before making any more definitive decisions on Peterson's future with the only NFL team he has ever played for. 
 
 "As evidenced by our decision to deactivate Adrian from yesterday's game, this is clearly a very important issue," the owners said. "On Friday, we felt it was in the best interests of the organization to step back, evaluate the situation, and not rush to judgment given the seriousness of this matter. At that time, we made the decision that we felt was best for the Vikings and all parties involved. 
 
 "To be clear, we take very seriously any matter that involves the welfare of a child. At this time, however, we believe this is a matter of due process and we should allow the legal system to proceed so we can come to the most effective conclusions and then determine the appropriate course of action. This is a difficult path to navigate, and our focus is on doing the right thing. Currently, we believe we are at a juncture where the most appropriate next step is to allow the judicial process to move forward." 
 
 He faces an initial court appearance in Conroe, Texas, on Wednesday on a charge of reckless or negligent injury to a child, which carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 
 
 Corporal punishment is legal in Texas and non-deadly force against a child by a parent or guardian is permissible. But the punishment is abusive if it causes injury. A blow that leaves a bruise, welt or swelling, or requires medical attention, could be judged abusive. The guidelines also say use of an instrument "is cause for concern." 
 
 Peterson's attorney said his client has acknowledged striking his son as a form of discipline similar to what Peterson endured as a young boy growing up in Palestine, Texas. He said Peterson was cooperating with the investigation and did not mean to inflict any harm on his son. 
 
 Hours later, the Vikings decided not to play Peterson against the Patriots, moving swiftly after a week in which the NFL came under heavy scrutiny for its handling of a domestic violence case involving former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice. 
 
 The Vikings clearly see Peterson's case as different from an abuse case they were confronted with in 2011 involving former cornerback Chris Cook, who was accused of choking his girlfriend. Cook was initially suspended by the team before being reinstated with pay. But the Vikings barred him from all team activities, including games, while the legal process unfolded. 
 
 Cook wound up missing 10 games and was eventually acquitted. He never faced discipline from the NFL and played two more seasons with the Vikings before signing with the 49ers. 
 
 The NFL is looking into Peterson's case, and if convicted he could face a minimum six-game suspension under the league's new tougher domestic abuse policy that was implemented after Commissioner Roger Goodell admitted he botched Rice's initial punishment. 
 
 The Vikings' decision to reinstate Peterson comes on the same day the NFL announced that three experts in domestic violence will serve as senior advisers to the league. Goodell sent a memo to teams Monday announcing that Lisa Friel, Jane Randel and Rita Smith will "help lead and shape the NFL's policies and programs relating to domestic violence and sexual assault." 
 
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 On Friday, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was indicted in Texas for injuring a child. According to the police report, Peterson’s son had shoved another of his children off a motorbike video game. In response, Peterson snatched a tree branch, picked off the leaves, and whipped his son on the legs, ankles, back, buttocks, and scrotum. According to the son, Peterson shoved leaves in his mouth during the whipping; Peterson’s son also said this kind of beating had occurred before. 
 
 Mark Joseph Stern Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues. 
 
 But don’t expect Peterson to go to prison any time soon. It’s not at all clear that Peterson’s whipping broke the law. In fact, in much of the United States, beating your own children—even to the point of bodily harm—is perfectly legal. 
 
 The notion of child abuse as a distinct crime is a fairly recent invention. Through America’s first century, parents were left to raise their children as they saw fit. Corporal punishment—spanking, whipping, even battering—was widely accepted; prosecutors only intervened when they felt parents engaged in “wanton and needless cruelty.” (One father charged for such “cruelty” in 1869 had doused his blind son in kerosene then locked him in a frigid cellar for several days in the dead of winter. He was fined $300 and received no jail time.) But any punishment that fell short of blatant barbarism was generally considered a private matter. 
 
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 In the last quarter of the 19th century, the law began to shift. Widespread maltreatment of children in New York’s squalid tenements led to early iterations of child protective services, which then began to spring up across the country. Initially, these services focused on saving children from neglect, providing them with shelter and nutrition when their own parents could not. But neglect and abuse often went hand-in-hand, and by the 20th century, child protective services were also tasked with rescuing children from potentially life-threatening abuse. 
 
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 It was not until the 1960s that the concept of child abuse began to appear on most middle-class families’ radars. In 1962, a spate of articles—first in academic journals, then in popular magazines—brought child abuse to the attention of mainstream America. The most famous of these articles, “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” shocked millions of Americans by implying that their routine disciplinary practices might actually be deeply harming their children. Child abuse, the authors noted, occurs not just in slums but also “among people with good education and stable financial and social background.” The subtext of the line was clear to parents who engaged in casual spanking and whipping: This means you. 
 
 Legislatures across the country responded to the new research by explicitly criminalizing child abuse. But the new laws generally prohibited only “serious” bodily injury—with the understanding that traditional punishments like spanking and smacking would remain a parental prerogative. In the 1970s, legislators shifted their focus to child sexual abuse, a once nearly invisible horror that, by the end of the decade, was seen as the chief threat to children’s well-being. Americans began to fixate on the savagery of molestation, and the laws regarding non-sexual abuse remained fairly constant. Today, it’s still largely true that parents can beat their children as punishment so long as they don’t inflict dangerous, long-term physical damage. 
 
 Though the laws regarding child abuse have stagnated, the research certainly hasn’t. In recent years, scientists have found that even spanking—the most widely accepted and allegedly humane form of corporal punishment—has alarmingly negative consequences for childhood development. Spanking can increase a child’s risk of aggression, antisocial behavior, and mental health disorders later in life. It slows cognitive development and decreases language skills. Spanking may not leave outward signs of injury. But the mental scars it inflicts can last a lifetime. 
 
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 Not a single legislature in the United States, however, has outlawed spanking in the home—and 19 states still permit corporal punishment in schools, a practice the Supreme Court condoned as constitutional in 1977. More troublingly, most states’ child abuse statutes are broad enough to allow an array of corporal punishment. The Texas statute under which Peterson was charged criminalizes “bodily injury” to a child “recklessly, or with criminal negligence.” But Texas courts have held that parents may still physically punish their children with a limited degree of force when such punishment is “necessary to discipline [the] child or to safeguard or promote his welfare.” 
 
 When is force “necessary to discipline” a child? That’s up to the jury. And juries in Texas have interpreted the statute rather generously: Parents who slap or whip their children in what might be deemed the “traditional” way tend to get off scot-free, while Texas courts have clarified that spanking only violates the statute when it’s committed with an intent to cause serious bodily injury. Only parents whose cruelty truly shocks the conscience are convicted under the statute; one father was imprisoned after whipping his daughter with a dog leash, while another was sentenced to 10 years in prison after spanking his children so hard with a wooden oar that it broke on their buttocks. 
 
 It’s impossible to know, of course, whether a jury will find the beating Peterson administered to be acceptable discipline or child abuse. But current case law gives Peterson reason for optimism. The way he punished his son probably isn’t the kind of thing the Texas legislature meant to criminalize. Parents have done this kind of thing to their kids for centuries. Such a “whooping,” as Peterson put it, might shock your conscience. But that doesn’t mean it’ll shock the conscience of a Texas jury. 
 
 Peterson’s case reveals a broader problem with America’s child-abuse laws: It’s surprisingly difficult to tell where legal corporal punishment ends and criminal child abuse begins—and so long as the former is allowed, the latter seems bound to occur. The fear of overlap between physical discipline and illegal abuse is part of what spurred Sweden to outlaw corporal punishment, including spanking, in 1977. Since then, nearly 40 countries have followed suit. But physical punishment remains legal in every single U.S. state. 
 
 That doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. In 2007, lawmakers in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and California briefly considered anti-spanking bills, but the attempts quickly fizzled following widespread outrage. In 2012, Delaware did pass a law tightening restrictions on corporal punishment in the home by forbidding parents from inflicting “physical injury to a child through unjustified force.” Although the bill’s sponsors repeatedly explained that spanking would not qualify as “unjustified force” under the statute, some parents still complained, claiming that the law amounted to a spanking ban. By far the most vocal proponents of corporal punishment in America are conservative Christians, some of whom believe that the Bible verse about the rod should be taken literally. To these Christians, physical discipline is a necessary component of raising children. 
 
 So extreme is conservatives’ support of corporal punishment, in fact, that Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked America’s ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The treaty is designed to stop child trafficking, prostitution, and pornography, as well as the use of children in military conflicts. But conservatives believe that it would also outlaw spanking. This is unlikely, given that scores of countries that practice corporal punishment have signed without a conflict. But American conservatives seem to have successfully made their case against the treaty to the two-thirds of Americans who spank their children. (Only two countries in the world have not ratified the treaty: The United States and Somalia.)
– Adrian Peterson has been accused of child abuse, then quickly reinstated, and don't expect him to go to prison, writes Mark Joseph Stern on Slate, because "in much of the United States, beating your own children—even to the point of bodily harm—is perfectly legal." Corporal punishment used to be largely accepted, and it wasn't until fairly recently that we started to sometimes view it as child abuse, Stern writes. Child abuse didn't even appear on mainstream America's radar until the 1960s, when an article on it "shocked millions of Americans by implying that their routine disciplinary practices might actually be deeply harming their children." Even so, only "serious" bodily injury is actually against the law, meaning parents are free to spank, smack, and even beat their kids so long as they don't cross the line into inflicting "long-term physical damage," Stern writes. This despite the fact that recent research has found even spanking, largely accepted and seen as "humane," can have serious developmental consequences for kids. Yet not only does spanking remain legal in all US homes, 19 states still permit it in schools. And when abuse cases come to trial, juries tend to let off parents who slap or whip their children, unless the punishment is inflicted in a particularly shocking way. "It’s surprisingly difficult to tell where legal corporal punishment ends and criminal child abuse begins," Stern writes. "And so long as the former is allowed, the latter seems bound to occur." Click for his full column.