Sometimes I like to kid myself that I live in a civilised country, where people of any shape or size can co-exist and be protected by law. Then I see the debate on smacking – revived at the weekend by former Education Minister David Lammy – and I’m reminded with a jolt that it’s still deemed a parent’s right to physically punish the smallest, most vulnerable people in society. And that society seems okay with that.
According to David Lammy MP, in an interview with LBC Radio, Labour’s decision in 2004 to tighten the smacking law was a factor in last summer’s riots. He argues working-class parents should be able to physically discipline their children to prevent them from joining gangs and getting involved in knife crime.
I think smacking children to discipline them for bad behaviour is wrong. I think physically snatching a child away from a hot oven or a road busy with traffic isn’t.
In England and Wales, the Children Act 2004 says parents can mildly smack their children as long as their action does not cause “reddening of the skinâ€. Any punishment which causes harm like bruising or cuts can face legal action, with adults facing up to five years in jail.
This legislation on smacking is stricter than in Scotland. Back in 2003, the Scottish Executive intended to make it an offence to smack children under the age of three, or hit those of any age with an “implement” such as a belt, slipper or cane. The latter proposals were adopted, but the ban on smacking toddlers was dropped after the measure was rejected at committee stage.
Lammy’s notion that rebellion in young people and children will be quelled, and not generated, by fear of physical chastisement is ridiculous. The proposal that last summer’s civic unrest, as well as ongoing antisocial and violent behaviour, stems from too few unruly kids getting a clip around the ear is the kind of patronising nonsense which I expect to spew from out-of-touch politicians with no real care or concern as to why some of Britain’s youth are rioting. The notion that smacking should be okay for working class parents in particular is disgusting. Are we okay with men from working class backgrounds hitting their wives and girlfriends?
I think children who are hurt become angry and humiliated, and less likely to behave in a way that meets society’s expectations. Children who are told at school to talk about their fallings outs and find ways to be kind to their playmates, but who then go home and get hit because someone can’t be bothered to explain to them why their behaviour is wrong are well aware of the hypocrisy. I think unemployment, lack of aspiration and cuts to public services will do far, far more damage to good parenting and well-behaved teenagers than whether or not you’re permitted to smack your children.
Lammy’s comments are absurd: being able to physically punish children will do nothing to resolve antisocial behaviour, and probably only encourages it. But what I find almost worse is that this is a debate which is still acceptable today. It’s amazing that society at large seems okay with a violent act by an adult inflicted on a child in a way which would be unacceptable between adults – partners, colleagues, strangers.
Sweden was the first country in the world to ban the physical punishment of children in 1979. Since then, reports of neglect and child abuse have risen. According to Louise Sylwander, Sweden’s first Children’s Ombudsman, there’s no evidence this is because of a corresponding rise in actual cases of abuse in Sweden: instead, it seems the ban has led society to become less tolerant of violence against children, and more confident in reporting children at risk.
Young adults who rioted, who are violent, who carry knives do so for a myriad of complex social and economic reasons, which a decent society should endeavour to resolve. They don’t do it because they’re bad, and because that badness wasn’t beaten out of them at an early enough age. Poverty and poor parenting are issues within this myriad web of causes, but so too is a society that doesn’t care enough, where politicians can lazily pontificate and legislation can fall far too short to protect the vulnerable. Simply, having to resort to smacking is a failure, on every possible level.
#1 by Aldos Rendos on January 30, 2012 - 12:17 pm
Fine piece Kirsty, what I also fine utterly patronising is the ‘I was smacked as a kid and it didn’t do me any harm’ attitude. Just because it didn’t do you any psychological harm doesn’t make it right. If we are serious about reducing violent crime and domestic abuse we must ensure that children are brought up in a peaceful environment where differences are sorted by reason and understanding rather than violence.
#2 by Don McC on January 30, 2012 - 6:47 pm
Actually, many experts think that the psychological harm done is that the person thinks it’s perfectly okay to smack a child.
Hard to argue against that.
#3 by Alec on January 30, 2012 - 7:20 pm
Eight/nineteenth Century Quaker atomic theorist, John Dalton started life as a school-teacher with brother Jonathan but left for academia after being traumatized by the experiences of holding down boys as Jonathan merrily thrashed them.
Little mention has been made of the boys’ emotions.
~alec
#4 by oxkev on January 30, 2012 - 12:18 pm
The Swedes’ have clearly demonstrated that it is perfectly doable to bring up children, provide appropriate boundaries and produce well adjusted adults without resorting to any form of physical punishment.
Since physical punishment is so clearly unnecessary why are we even having this discussion. Who could want to unnecessarily cause physical pain to their child unless they weren’t in control of their own violent emotions?
#5 by Indy on January 30, 2012 - 12:44 pm
It’s not as simple as that. Most parents replicate their own upbringing to a large extent. If they were smacked for doing something particularly naughty then they will probably do the same thing to their own kids without really thinking about it too much. So it goes on.
I think we need to acknowledge the difficulties politicians would face here if they tried to bring in legislation along the Swedish lines. It would be seen as the nanny state gone mad type of thing. Equally however things won’t really change unless there is some form of legislation prohibiting adults from assaulting children. Maybe the best approach would be to try and build a political consensus and then the politicians could try and persuade those of the public who would see it as an unwarranted interference in family life.
#6 by Indy on January 30, 2012 - 12:34 pm
Totally agree. It’s one of these issues where you can sometimes think is the world mad or is it me? How could it possibly be right that smacking an adult could get you arrested for assault but smacking a child is legally allowable? Bonkers.
#7 by Alec on January 30, 2012 - 6:37 pm
It’s an imperfect comparison – ‘cos, like comparing misbehaving adults to misbehaving children, it aint a perfect comparison – but you could see just that in military training situations.
~alec
#8 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 10:19 am
Of course it is an imperfect comparison. Children are by definition more vulnerable than most adults so logically should have greater legal protection against being hit, not less. Military training situations are neither here nor there, they weren’t letting toddlers into the SAS last time I was down Hereford way!
#9 by Alec on January 31, 2012 - 12:30 pm
Yet it aint what you said. You where there’d be examples of adults being permitted to strike adults, and I gave you one. In response, you’ve allowed yourself latitude whilst expecting cast iron examples from others.
Children are more vulnerable than adults so it would be considered bad-form, and even cruelty to force march them through a muddy field whilst kicking stragglers up the bottom. And lest you say army recruits enter into the situation voluntarily, taken to its conclusion this would give license to extreme beatings or humiliations up to but not including (well, maybe not) the situation of a rash of suicides at Catterick.
It doesn’t, by the way.
~alec
#10 by Richard on January 30, 2012 - 12:57 pm
I do think that the riots are the result of insufficient discipline at home, but there is no need for discipline to be physical. It is more likely that since the option of physical discipline has been removed, many parents are at a loss as to how to implement non-physical discipline.
There is an innate assumption that people should automatically know how to be a parent but, in my own experience as a parent, that is far from the truth. I was lucky, as a well-educated, middle-class sort of person (even if it’s unfashionable to admit that), that I could research these things and learn a lot, but many do not have that opportunity.
We cannot just ban smacking without providing an alternative. I think a good start would be to provide free parenting lessons to new and expectant parents, as well as refresher courses later on.
#11 by Doug Daniel on January 30, 2012 - 1:56 pm
I think you’ve got a point there. I find it difficult to completely condemn smacking, purely because I was smacked a few times when I was little, and I really do not recognise the kind of language that people use when discussing the issue. If anything, I actually find it a tad insulting to have it implied that my mother was anything other than excellent by saying that “smacking is a failure”, or to describe it as “violence”, or to draw conclusions that smacking leads to domestic abuse.
Like many things, it’s an anachronism from a time where this was the way things were done. We should be trying to change that idea (and indeed, when I have children I won’t be smacking them), but the way some people speak about it, you would think every smacked child in the land was left cowering in fear every time their parents came near them. Let’s move away from that style of parenting, but without making out that those who don’t know there are better alternatives are bad parents in some way. There really is a marked difference between smacking someone’s rump and actually striking them to cause pain, so to conflate the two doesn’t do anyone any favours.
However, the main issue really is that it’s not a lack of smacking that leads youngsters to grow up to be little brats, it’s lack of respect for their parents, and indeed, their parents’ own lack of respect for society. I often resisted peer pressure because the thought of disappointing my mum was far worse than the idea of being slagged off for a few days by friends. My mum was “black affronted” when I came home with a punishment exercise once, whereas others in my class seemed to collect them for fun (“ha ha, I’ve got another punny!”). How do you get your child to give you respect? By showing them that you actually give a toss about them and take an interest in them.
#12 by Indy on January 30, 2012 - 3:39 pm
It is a state of mind. 50 years ago if a husband smacked his wife because she did not have the tea on the table on time most people would not have thought of interfering “between man and wife” because that’s how things were then. It’s different today – even if the husband didn’t physically hurt his wife, people recognise that smacking someone is as much about humiliating and degrading them as it is about inflicting physical pain. And if that is true of one adult smacking another how much more true is it of an adult smacking a child? Agreed there may be no intention to degrade and humiliate but that’s the effect isn’t it.
#13 by Colin Dunn on January 30, 2012 - 2:44 pm
“I think smacking children to discipline them for bad behaviour is wrong. I think physically snatching a child away from a hot oven or a road busy with traffic isn’t.”
What about smacking to educate that something is dangerous? Children must learn to stay away from dangerous things (fires, traffic, etc), and sometimes the concept of the danger is too complex to learn at a young age and the only way to avoid permanent harm is for them to learn to associate the danger with pain or shock of smacking.
I’ve seen children patiently told again and again and again not to run across busy roads, but still doing it. In one case this resulted in the child being knocked down (fortunately scratches and bruises only). Sometimes persuasion, patience and reasonableness is not enough to save a life or prevent injury.
Colin
#14 by Indy on January 30, 2012 - 3:49 pm
That argument drives me mad. It’s a kind of Pavlovian response you are looking for but children aren’t dogs – they are in a constant state of cognitive development. At no point do they actually require to be given an electric shock to reinforce particular behaviour patterns. Neither do dogs of course but dogs aren’t as capable of critical thinking as even the youngest child.
#15 by Colin Dunn on January 30, 2012 - 6:44 pm
So what alternative would you suggest in the scenario I related above?
Colin
#16 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 6:25 am
Hold their hand
#17 by Alec on January 31, 2012 - 9:45 am
That’s a monumentally facetious comment, Indy; with a potentially implied reproach against parents whose child is knocked-down (“where were you???”).
Unless the child is tethered to the parent or never allowed to leave the house alone (which I’m sure you’d object to), there will be plenty of instances where they’re beside busy roads.
~alec
#18 by Colin Dunn on January 31, 2012 - 10:53 am
Can’t do that 24 hours a day, though.
Colin
#19 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 1:32 pm
They are not crossing the road 24 hours a day though, are they?
You know if your kid hasn’t learned to cross the road safely hold their hand until they do. If they haven’t learned to stay away from the fire buy a fire-guard. If they haven’t learned not to touch a hot oven keep them away from the oven till they do. Etc.
Smacking them really isn’t going to make them learn any faster and if your priority is to keep them safe then keep them safe, don’t rely on giving them a skelp and hoping it will have some effect.
#20 by Alec on January 30, 2012 - 6:28 pm
You still do. It’d be one thing to state that no formal of physical chastisement of children should be permitted. I don’t think that, but recognized that an argument to the effect can reasonably and sincerely be made.
Starting your piece with such an example of question begging – children still do have the protection of the law, and it has been a great many years, if ever, since parents have been permitted to cause lasting injury through bruises or drawing blood and so on – suggests you aint seeking any discussion; just talking from a soap box.
~alec
#21 by Observer on January 30, 2012 - 7:53 pm
I would be willing to bet that a lot of the rioters probably were smacked, or just hit really, when they were growing up.
Just smacking a child does not instill discipline, in many cases it does just the opposite.
#22 by Alec on January 30, 2012 - 9:12 pm
Good point, although I suspect the driving force of the riots was a rump of habitual criminality which hadn’t been challenged.
In the context of this discussion, the student rioters – not protesters: walking down a street waving a placard is protest; smashing-up a building is riot – of 2010 would be a better comparison. Drawn from the first generation children brought-up to expect _not_ to receive physical chastisement, a significant cohort thought this granted them immunity to anything up to and including sniggeringly accosting the second in line to the Throne or dropping fire extinguishers onto the heads of Police.
~alec
#23 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 6:44 am
?
What about the student rioters of the 1960s?
I suppose they weren’t smacked enough either!
#24 by Alec on January 31, 2012 - 9:39 am
What about them? I thought we were talking about a sudden explosion of urban disorder in 2010/1 and not a gradual working-up to it through a mixture of real and manufactured anger more than four decades previously. Not to mention one where physical coercion and more was expected from the Police and the protagonists factored this in (not to say that rioters were better back in the day).
I’d be careful, Indy, ‘cos you could find yourself in a corner where you’re asking why a predominately middle-class cohort receiving all the benefits of state-funded tertiary education – along with groups with less-than-clear foreign funding – misbehaved whilst the majority of the population (including those from a section of the population more likely to receive some form of physical chastisement as children) got on with their lives.
~alec
#25 by Observer on January 31, 2012 - 10:38 pm
On the whole I expect habitual criminals to be recidivists. Most of the rioters were not old enough to have been jailed once, never mind repeatedly.
In amongst all the industrial shop lifting that we saw I think there was a point to the rioting although, I think it is unlikely that the current mob in Westminster will get that. Which is fair enough as Labour don’t get it either.
Between them they have born a sub-class of youth who in many cases have no relationship with society at all.
Students have always tended to get a bit carried away, I wouldn’t read too much into that.
#26 by Red Celt on January 31, 2012 - 3:17 am
I find the above article as fringe-lunatic as the US parents who buy paddles in order to discipline their kids. You are both at the extremes of the bell curve, when (as usual) the answer lies somewhere inbetween.
There really is nothing wrong with a smack on the bum (a skelped arse, as I knew it) at an early age, along with a verbal rebuke. The verbal rebuke then becomes the normative process, with the smack no longer necessary. And I really do mean a smack, on clothed skin, not violent abuse.
The smacked bum that I received as a kid left no resentments, nor hang-ups, nor a likelihood to inflict pain on others. The same could not be said, however, for my dad removing his belt and doing serious harm. I became an expert at navigating the dining-room table faster than the nut-job with the strap of leather; treatment that continued until I finally reached the age where I could defend myself. That was bullying/mistreatment and shouldn’t be tolerated in society.
A smacked bum, though… seriously… it enhances the Darwinian interests for small children, who are accidents waiting to happen. Children lack the reasoning abilities of adults, so stop comparing the two. Also, a parent has a legal and moral obligation to care for their children and (if they care) to make sure that no real harm comes to them. Adults are another matter entirely.
#27 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 6:34 am
It’s not extreme though. Sweden may have been the first country to ban smacking in 1979 but it’s certainly not the last. In most European countries physcal punishment of children is now banned. Perhaps most modern European countries are extreme by your definition – but to my mnd it is actually the UK that is backward in this respect.
#28 by Alwyn ap Huw on January 31, 2012 - 7:22 am
I share some of the misgivings mentioned above about making smacking illegal. I am of an age where to be belted by my Dad, caned by my headmaster or given a smack around the ear by the local policeman, was a norm that children expected.
An argument that starts with the premise that physical chastisement of children is something monstrous, suggests that I had abusive parents, hateful teachers and vicious local Bobbies. But nothing could be further from the truth. I had loving parents, teachers who wanted the best for their pupils and Bobbies who cared for the wellbeing of their communities.
The starting point of this debate shouldn’t be the criminalisation of physical chastisement, but the propagation of alternative means of providing formative guidance for children. Without that sort of guidance many parents are left in fear of their children. The parents know that they can’t do what their Dad did, and the children know that too, so the children become feral.
I have noticed that many of the things that I was caned for in school now end up in the youth courts. Personally I am glad that I had six of the best rather than the lifelong stain of a criminal record; I would prefer to have my boys backsides tanned by the headmaster’s cane rather than have their lives blighted by a criminal record
I smacked my children when I was a young father of small children. My kids may not agree with me, and Kirsty may not agree, but at the time I thought that I was behaving as a loving and caring parent. I hated doing it, but I thought it was for the best; and I didn’t like the alternative of state intervention into my family life!
Offer an alternative way of doing the dificult job of bringing up kids, before rushing to Parliament to give me and my kid a criminal record because the best way that I know of punishing him for things like stealing is to whack his behind!
#29 by Indy on January 31, 2012 - 11:39 am
“An argument that starts with the premise that physical chastisement of children is something monstrous, suggests that I had abusive parents, hateful teachers and vicious local Bobbies.”
No it doesn’t. It starts with the premise that attitudes can and do change. That doesn’t mean that you retrospectively turn people into monsters.
As I said 50 years ago it was not at all unusual for a husband to give his wife a wee tap, as they said, if she got out of line or failed to have his tea on the table on time. Some of those men were abusers – but some of them will just have been regular normal guys behaving in the way that their society expected them to behave. Their dad gave their mum a wee tap when she got out of line so they did the same to their wives. Didn’t mean that they didn’t love their wives but they didn’t have the impetus to change the way society viewed that kind of thing and therefore the context that their behaviour took place in. Other people forced that change.
Atitudes always change, they move on and the same will happen with smacking kids in my view. 50 years from now it will be as unnacceptable to smack a child as it is for a man to smack his wife now. And if, in 50 years time, someone smacks their child then yes they will be a monster and an abuser, just as a man who smacks his wife is an abuser today, because they will be breaking the rules laid down by society as well as repressing any internal disquiet they may feel at their own behaviour.
#30 by Alec on January 31, 2012 - 12:38 pm
And, with the euphemism “walked into doors”, it would appear it wasn’t necessarily considered socially acceptable.
~alec
#31 by Alwyn ap Huw on February 1, 2012 - 1:37 am
I agree with all of the points that you make Indy; except that I hope that such a change in attitudes doesn’t take another 50 years; but my concerns remain.
Before parliaments (be they European, Scottish, Welsh or Westminster) use the force of law to deal with the issue there MUST be a period of education where alternatives to smacking are propagated amongst all parents and there must be a social agreement that prosecuting children in criminal courts for the misdemeanours that they would have been smacked for will not become the alternative norm, as it has appeared to have become since the abolition of corporal punishment in schools.
#32 by Barbarian on January 31, 2012 - 11:59 pm
I got smacked as a kid, not often but when I had crossed the line once too many times. My kids have got the occasional smack, however I only need to yell at them and that is generally sufficient. Grounding works wonders as well. There is a difference between mild chastisement and physical abuse. Giving someone a criminal record for a tap on the back of a hand would be destructive.
Hammering through legislation can cause more problems if not carefully thought through.
#33 by Indy on February 1, 2012 - 1:06 pm
As far as I am aware nobody in any of the (majority of) European countries where smacking is illegal has ended up with a criminal record or been sent to jail for a tap on the back of the hand.
But I am sure that you, like me, may well have been in the position where you have witnessed someone going a good deal further than a tap on the back of the hand. It would be good to know that in those circumstances the law would be clear because at present it’s not.
The law is really so mixed up about this. One of the reasons I feel quite strongly about it is that I have a friend who has split up from her partner. Her partner has now re-married. He has access to their child, which she strongly supports because obviously she wants her child to continue to have a good relationship with his father. But the father’s new partner believes in smacking – which my friend does not. And she goes further than a smack on the back of the hand.
The law cannot do anything about this. Social work have investigated but there is nothing they can do because this woman does not smack my friend’s son hard enough to constitute an assault legally speaking. But she smacks him a lot harder than my friend is comfortable with. She is in a catch 22 situation though. She doesn’t want to go to court to try and restrict access and she would have no legal grounds for doing that anyway. It’s a heartbreaking situation.
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