At the weekend parents in Scotland lost the right to “reasonably chastise” their children.
In a couple of years they’ll be followed by their counterparts in Wales, when the principality introduces its own ban on smacking children in 2022. Devolution, it turns out, isn’t just about taking a different approach to Covid-19.
Sweden was the first country to ban the smacking of children, in 1979. Scotland has become the 58th, which makes advocates of a ban feel that they are on the right side of history. And that, in turn, helps them overcome any misgivings they might have about their new law’s evident unpopularity: a recent poll of Scots showed that 70 per cent of respondents were against a ban.
But in truth, Holyrood has gone further than many other countries, most of which have made the smacking of children a civil offence. From November 7 2020, parents in Scotland can now be charged by the police with assault for acts which, hitherto, were considered below the bar of criminal conviction.
Opponents of the ban in Scotland say laws already existed to penalise abusive parents. Shaking, smacks aimed at the head and using an “implement” were already illegal. Only the very mildest physical discipline was permitted under the “justifiable assault” defence of “reasonable chastisement”.
The insertion of the state into family life in quite such a dramatic way risks further corroding the authority of parents over children.
So, the anti-ban campaigners argue, the new law will result in good parents being criminalised, with others – in certain professions – losing their jobs. The police and social workers, meanwhile, will be overwhelmed with trivial cases. They will miss graver ones.
And you can certainly picture the scene.
A stressed mother is pushing a buggy along the pavement with a toddler walking alongside. The toddler does what toddlers do, and has a tantrum. It’s a busy road, with noisy lorries thundering past at little more than arm’s length away. The toddler breaks free, oblivious to the danger.
What should happen next is that the frazzled parent patiently explains to her offspring that running into the traffic isn’t conducive to the attainment of adulthood. What she actually does is slap the back of her child’s legs, before carrying on with her day, reasoning that a lecture in risk management is likely to go over the head of a pre-verbal child.
Unfortunately, her day is – in fact – about to get a lot worse. A passer-by has filmed the incident on his smartphone and has called the police. Anyone who thinks this scenario is far-fetched hasn’t been paying attention during the pandemic. It transpires many of our fellow citizens are really quite keen on filming minor infractions of the law by neighbours, and quite keen to denounce them to the authorities.
The police and social workers, meanwhile, will be overwhelmed with trivial cases. They will miss graver ones.
Indeed last month “Be Reasonable Scotland”, a group campaigning against the ban, highlighted new government guidance which urged members of the public to call police if they saw a parent smacking a child. The advice (subsequently removed) said Scots should “dial 999 to report a crime in progress”.
Will England and Northern Ireland follow suit? It’s certainly a hardy perennial subject for news organisations south of the border. I’ve moderated several debates for and against over the years. In fact, I was the subject of a Daily Mail story after hosting one such interview live on-air in 2014. I told a young – and childless – activist who was campaigning for a ban that he was “talking out of [his] backside”. It was meant kindly.
Privately, architects of the ban will say that it is more about “sending a signal” than it is about securing prosecutions against well-meaning parents. But laws have a habit of being implemented in ways those who drafted them never imagined. It’s that road to hell and good intentions again.
Laws have a habit of being implemented in ways those who drafted them never imagined.
The insertion of the state into family life in quite such a dramatic way risks further corroding the authority of parents over children, and even the trust the latter has in the former. It’s hard to imagine how a child would interpret their “misbehaviour” if it resulted in the sight of their parent looking petrified as police arrived in the living room.
A final thought. Twenty years ago Frank Furedi published his seminal book Paranoid Parenting. He warned that society was in danger of turning the act of parenting into a kind of test that many parents could never pass. 15 years ago, I discussed the book with him at his home in Kent, and suggested that such burdens were another reason why families were shrinking in size. Certainly, the increasingly popular “only-child gold standard” makes scenarios like the example I cite above – the parent struggling to navigate the world with more than one – more likely to excite attention.
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