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Although the cultural divide between Europe and the U.S. has narrowed over the years, the legal fate of director Roman Polanski shows there are still major differences. Polanski's arrest in Switzerland on Sept. 26 was greeted with satisfaction in the U.S., where authorities hope he will face sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Europeans, meanwhile, are shocked and dismayed that an internationally acclaimed artist could be jailed for such an old offense.

"To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event honoring him — is absolutely horrifying," French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said after Polanski was arrested upon arrival in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award. "There's an America we love and an America that scares us, and it's that latter America that has just shown us its face." In comments that appeared to be directed at Swiss and American authorities to free Polanski, Mitterrand added that both he and French President Nicolas Sarkozy hoped for a "rapid resolution to the situation which would allow Roman Polanski to rejoin his family as quickly as possible." (See the top 25 crimes of the century.)

Polanski, who won an Academy Award in 2003 for directing The Pianist, admitted to having unlawful sexual intercourse with 13-year-old Samantha Geimer as part of a plea bargain in which other charges — including drugging and raping the girl — were dropped. However, fearful that the Los Angeles judge in the case was about to renege on the deal and slap him with a long prison sentence, Polanski fled the U.S. in 1978 and never returned. He has spent the past 30 years in France, where he has raised a family and continued his career unhindered. That is, until Saturday. Swiss police seized Polanski on an international warrant issued by U.S. authorities in 2005 and, under bilateral treaties, will now extradite him to the U.S. unless barred from doing so by Swiss courts. (Read "Redeeming Roman Polanski.")

France never complied with the arrest warrant because its laws prohibit the extradition of its citizens to other countries. At the same time, many people in France have over the years downplayed the gravity of Polanski's crime because of his immense talent and artistry as a director. The 76-year-old, who was born in France, has increasingly been seen as the victim of an obsessive U.S. justice system that is ready to pluck him up and drag him off to prison at any moment. Those feelings were reinforced by the 2008 documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, in which filmmaker Marina Zenovich argues that the judge and prosecutor in the case may have engaged in legal misconduct in obtaining Polanski's guilty plea. The film also contains an appeal by Geimer, the victim, for Polanski to be pardoned — leaving his European supporters perplexed as to why U.S. officials wouldn't finally close the book on him. (Read "More Sex, Please, We're French.")

"The French view Polanski as an artist and celebrity and feel he deserves a different kind of treatment than ordinary people, which just isn't an option in the U.S.," says Ted Stanger, an author and longtime resident of France who has written extensively on the differing public views and attitudes across the Atlantic. "The French in particular, and Europeans in general, don't understand why it isn't possible for American officials to intervene and say, 'Hey, it's been over 30 years and things look a little different now. Let's just forget this thing.' "

Indeed, police in other European countries have turned a blind eye to Polanski's travel across the continent for work and pleasure over the years. The director has even made frequent visits to Switzerland in the past without any problem. His supporters claim that Swiss authorities finally caved in to U.S. pressure to nab the director. But Swiss and U.S. justice officials say they knew where he would be thanks to press releases by the Zurich Film Festival touting his presence to accept the award. "There was a valid arrest request, and we knew when he was coming. That's why he was taken into custody," says Guido Balmer, spokesman for Switzerland's Justice Ministry. Adds Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office: "It wasn't a big secret that he was going to be in Zurich — they had announced it on the Internet."

As Polanski's fans across Europe decry his detention, his lawyers say they're filing appeals of both his arrest and eventual transfer to the U.S. "To the French mind, this has made Polanski a combination of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Dreyfus — the victim of systematic persecution," Stanger says. "To the American mind, he's proof that no one is above the law." That's a perception gap as wide as the Atlantic.

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The debate over spanking goes back many years, but the essential question often evades discussion: does spanking actually work? In the short term, yes. You can correct immediate misbehavior with a slap or two on the rear-end or hand. But what about the long-term impact? Can spanking lead to permanent, hidden scars on children years later?

On Friday, a sociologist from the University of New Hampshire, Murray Straus, presented a paper at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, suggesting that corporal punishment does leave a long-lasting mark — in the form of lower IQ. Straus, who is 83 and has been studying corporal punishment since 1969, found that kids who were physically punished had up to a five-point lower IQ score than kids who weren't — the more children were spanked, the lower their IQ — and that the effect could be seen not only in individual children, but across entire nations. Among 32 countries Straus studied, in those where spanking was accepted, the average IQ of the survey population was lower than in nations where spanking was rare, the researcher says.

In the U.S., Straus and his colleague Mallie Paschall of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, looked at 1,510 children — 806 kids ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9 — and found that roughly three-quarters had endured some kind of corporal punishment in the previous two weeks, according to interviews with the mothers. Researchers measured the children's IQ initially, then again four years later. Those kids who hadn't been spanked in the initial survey period scored significantly better on intelligence and achievement tests than those who had been hit. Among the 2-to-4-year-olds, the difference in IQ was five points; among the older kids, there was a 2.8-point gap. That association held after taking into account parental education, income and other environmental factors, says Straus.

So how might getting spanked on the butt actually affect the workings of the brain? Straus notes that being spanked or hit is associated with fright and stress; kids who experience that kind of trauma have a harder time focusing and learning. In another recent paper that he coauthored with Paschall, Straus writes that previous research has found that even after you control for parental education and occupation, children of parents who use corporal punishment are less likely than other kids to graduate from college.

Still, it's not clear if spanking causes lower cognitive ability or if lower cognitive ability might somehow lead to more spanking. It's quite possible that kids with poor reasoning skills misbehave more often and therefore elicit harsher punishment. "It could be that lower IQ causes parents to get exasperated and hit more," Straus says, although he notes that a recent Duke University study of low-income families found that toddlers' low mental ability did not predict an increase in spanking. (The study did find, however, that kids who were spanked at age 1 displayed more aggressive behavior by age 2, and scored lower on cognitive development tests by age 3.) "I believe the relationship [between corporal punishment and IQ] is probably bidirectional," says Straus. "There has to be something the kid is doing that's wrong that leads to corporal punishment. The problem is, when the parent does that, it seems to have counterproductive results to cognitive ability in the long term."

One problem with Straus' data is that some of the parents who tended to spank may also have been engaging in actual physical abuse of their children. Researchers define corporal punishment as physical force intended to cause pain — but not injury — for the purpose of correcting a child's behavior, not simply hurting him. Studies have shown that very few parents who use corporal punishment also beat their kids, but Straus can't rule out the possibility that his data is confounded by the presence of child abuse, which past research has shown to affect victims' development.

The preponderance of evidence points away from corporal punishment, which the European Union and the United Nations have recommended against, but the data suggest that most parents, especially those in the U.S., still spank their kids. Based on his international data, collected by surveying more than 17,000 college students in various countries, Straus found that countries with higher GDP tended to be those where corporal punishment was used less often. In the U.S., the tendency to hit also varies with income, along with geography and culture; it's most common among African-American families, Southern families, parents who were spanked as children themselves and those who identify themselves as conservative Christians.

But overall the percentage of parents who spank has been steadily declining. Straus says that in 1968, 94% of Americans told surveyors they agreed with spanking. By 2005, the proportion who said it is "sometimes O.K. to spank a child" had fallen to 72%, although most researchers believe the actual incidence of corporal punishment is higher.

The practice has its defenders, and Straus himself admits, with chagrin in his voice, that he spanked his own son. In the 1990s, the American Academy of Pediatrics underwent a bitter fight before finally declaring in 1998 that "corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects."

Sometimes spanking seems like the only way to get through to an unruly toddler. But the price for fixing his poor short-term conduct might be an even more troublesome outcome in the future.