Opinion: Editor's view - The UK's refusal to ban smacking flies in the face of rational argument
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
By the time this issue of Nursery World is published, MPs will no doubt have voted against the amendment to the Children and Young Persons Bill seeking to outlaw physical punishment in the home.
Perhaps I will have been proved wrong - but I doubt it. Every time this issue arises, MPs decide that the 'reasonable chastisement' defence should be preserved, and that children should not be afforded equal protection under the law from assault.
Meanwhile, the latest report from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (see News, page 3) has just called for the third time for corporal punishment, including smacking, to be prohibited in UK homes. This is just one of a host of criticisms of the UK's legal and social shortcomings regarding the treatment of children and young people.
The British tendency to demonise and jail children, exploit them in reality TV shows, and violate their rights to 'freedom of movement and peaceful assembly' comes in for severe censure from the UN.
Yet the least likely area of concern to prompt some action is that of physical punishment. MPs hide behind the supposed weight of public opinion against a smacking ban, but they are happy to proclaim themselves ready to take unpopular decisions for the public good on other issues. A growing number of countries around the world have made corporal punishment illegal without a mass public outcry and without hundreds of parents being prosecuted for minor offences.
Equally, there is much discussion of the need for children to have positive role models. Being taught that physical violence is the way to discipline children does not meet this need.
