Bum rap pinned on parents
Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of 'reasonable chastisement' but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please lvvell, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations, 180 MPs and peers, the Methodist and Catholic Churches, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Lib Dems, 71 per cent of the general public (according to our old friend Mori Z. Poll), Penelope Leach, a roster of the great and the good from David Aaronovitch to Benjamin Zephaniah, and the late Dr Spock.
In the pro corner, we have Evangelical Christians, all those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, King Solomon, the Labour government, the Scottish Executive, and the late Dr Spock.
So how come Dr Spock appears twice? And what's Labour doing with that crowd? Well, we'll come to Labour later, but during the course of Spock's career as the world's paediatrician, he changed his mind about smacking, and became an anti. But as he's dead, he is not here to lend his support in person to the hugely powerful campaign that is gathering steam in Westminster to remove from parents the right to 'reasonably chastise' their own offspring, a removal that will necessarily criminalise millions of loving, responsible parents who slap a naughty child on the back of the legs, as well as this country's legion of vicious, violent, Millwall-supporting lowlifes who duff up their own kids for laffs.
I'm not exaggerating. If you read the literature put out by the Children Are Unbeatable! alliance, the lead agency of the anti-smacking lobby group, you would think that this country was a nation of child-beaters, and be ashamed to be British.
The alliance (let's call it Unbeatable! for short) likes to announce that 'children are being legally hit right now' and leans heavily on a 1997 piece of research commissioned by the Department of Health from two psychology dons called Marjorie Smith and Gavin Nobes, Unbeatable! claims that the SmithNobes study was based on interviews with more than 400 families. But some key findings are drawn from interviews with only 99 two-parent families on health authority lists in two areas — 'an urban area outside London and an area of South London', to be precise.
So Unbeatable!'s shocking and awful claim that over 90 per cent of parents hit and that 'most children are hit and many are hit severely' must be treated with caution. It is nonsense to extrapolate such a global assumption from what was, in part, a small sample of fewer than a hundred families, even if three quarters of mothers in the 400-family sample apparently admit hitting their babies before their first birthday.
Leaving that survey aside for a moment (not that Unbeatable! does), there are — on the face of it — many other good rea sons to remove the defence of 'reasonable chastisement,' from the Statute Book, where it has lain since 1860. In that year, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn ruled, after a teacher had beaten a pupil to death, that 'By the law of England, a parent . . may, for the purpose of correcting what is evil in the child, inflict moderate and reasonable corporal punishment.'
That remains the case. A husband may not beat his wife, nor a teacher a pupil; nor may a childminder smack a child even with the parents' permission. But a parent may still strike a child, and many acts of brutality take place, for which the police do not feel able to prosecute.
Over the past 50 years, smacking has been banned in 27 US states and in ten European countries: Germany, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Cyprus, Italy, Latvia. Norway and Sweden; but they love
most of all to tell you about Sweden. In Sweden, the change in the law was accompanied by a leafleting campaign to all households. In their pamphlets, parents were told that the law now forbade all forms of physical punishment of children, including smacking, although the state allowed that 'you can still snatch a child away from a hot stove or an open window if there is a risk of its injuring itself. Which gives you some idea of the level of authority Swedish parents have over Swedish children.
In Sweden smacking has been banned since 1979, and since then only four children have been beaten to death. In this country, where — as we are told — 'most children including babies are hit and many severely', there are one or two child deaths from battery per week.
Crikey, you think. It makes the issue sound like a no-brainer, given that this country has the highest rate of child deaths per head of population in Europe.
But it isn't, actually, and even though I may now be meaningfully asked 'When did you stop beating your children?', it is important to pause and consider the consequences of a change to the law, however well-intentioned. At this point, I'm afraid, this piece becomes like a movie about a court case — rather procedural.
In the Lords last week, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (on behalf of Unbeatable!) made a moving plea for a free vote on an amendment to the Children Bill, an amendment that would outlaw battery to a child for any reason except to prevent damage to property, the commission of a crime, and to avert danger.
'I know what it is like to be lonely, living in a highrise block with no money and two babies, one of whom cries incessantly,' she told the noble Lords. 'Without the restraint of having worked in paediatrics and having seen the results of shaking and hitting, I would have lost my rag. I feared that once I hit I would have been unable to stop, such was the pent-up emotion that I felt. That was as a young mum. The purpose of this reform is to send clear and unequivocal messages to parents that assaulting children, like assaulting adults, is wrong and unlawful.'
Previous page
