It was called "A crack" - and, as the name suggested, you would be hit (cracked) with whatever the adult closest to you could get their hands on.
Might have been their hands, a wooden spoon, the belt or the slipper.
The men around me were always so much worse than the women because cracking girls wasn't enough for them, they got big balls and always wanted to punch girls instead. Oddly enough, their balls never got so big that they actually tried to punch a girl as far as I know.
The worst thing I ever went through with a woman was getting my face jabbed at with a lit match. Don't do that - matches and long hair don't mix well... and, was the fact that I desperately needed the toilet proportional to getting full thickness burns - just because I had to go to the toilet before I could put the bags of stuff that I had just walked in with away???
