In honour of UNICEF’s Day Of The Girl, Researching Reform has written a piece for The Huffington Post inviting the government to ban all forms of corporal punishment.
Hitting, or smacking children as we call it, is still allowed in England and Wales, although it is fast being banned all over the world. A delicate issue, parents still feel that hitting their children is their prerogative, and an inalienable right that doesn’t cause long term damage, but weighty evidence is mounting up that contradicts these views.
Our aim with this article is not to threaten parents, or make them feel they are under attack. Researching Reform’s editor is a parent herself, and understands only too well how easy it is to lose control when tired and under pressure when it comes to parenting. This effort is about changing the law, to amplify a culture of respect for children and recognise them as equal in the eyes of the law.
Affecting girls as it does, corporal punishment is also a big issue for boys, and so we also ask that girls share this day with the boys, and that we join forces for a better, more egalitarian world, where children of both genders are protected and respected.
A very big thank you to Professor Joan Durrant, who is a pioneering child rights activist working on the effects of corporal punishment in the home, and without whose professional generosity and patient guidance, this article, with its host of renowned contributors would not have been possible.
Researching Reform 
I don’t agree with smacking but making it a criminal offence is an absurd over reaction.A smack with an open hand on the bum of a 4 or five year old can do no lasting harm and to make it an excuse for sending the child into fostercare or forced adoption is just plain ridiculous but it happens it happens……..
As for claims that it is illegal throughout most of the world …; Well tell that to the Chinese ,Russians,and Indians who make up the largest part of it !
Adults have a right not to be smacked you say? Well if an adult man complained that a woman had slapped his face after he made a certain suggestion to her……. Would he really be successful in prosecuting her or would he be laughed out of court???
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Hi Ian, thanks for your comment. In reality, parents would not be jailed for snacking unless there were serious and ongoing physical actions involved, changing the law just allows us to shift the culture so we understand children are equal to adults on the issue of assault.
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But Natasha I NEVER said in my comment above parents would be jailed for slapping. I said their children could be taken into fostercare or forcibly adopted :a far worse fate ! Yes this does happen right now !
i do not think children are at all equal to adults as far as non injurious assault goes;
No parent should suffer because a child in a crowded supermarket wants to run off and explore and is forcibly and a little roughly restrained;Try and restrain an adult for any reason and rightly you would be in trouble !
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Hi Ian, I was referring to your comment about making it a criminal offence, so the idea of jail time was inferred. We’re not talking about restraining here. This is about hitting.
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Just to show that adults and children are not equal especially if the escaping child in the supermarket had a slap on the bottom !
I think the present law is satisfactory A very unusual thing for me to say !.No bruise no crime ! After all there should be evidence to justify punishment .
If it’s not broke don’t fix it !
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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Having been one who was regularly ‘hit’ – the new word for smacking – well, I’m still here to tell the tale at sixty-nine years of age, and I do hope my parents will not be posthumously found guilty of ‘abuse’, in an investigation costing us all millions of pounds. I consider I deserved to be hit, because they actually did know better than me and their arguments had no effect. What next? Criminalised for telling a child off? Wagging a finger? (‘Threatening behaviour’)?
Each generation feels they know better than the last. My generation mocked the Victorians and Edwardians for their values, now my generation is being mocked and vilified for ours (admittedly, sometimes rightly so). In time, the present generation will be mocked as well, and their values despised and devalued. The present trend for ‘no-platforming’ anyone who holds a different view than theirs or is in the slightest way ‘non-PC’ will be a National Joke, (if it isn’t already!). I think the term is ‘the snowflake generation’.
I do not condone violence, and ironically would never slap a child, but I do understand that some parents find it impossible to resist doing so. Ian is right, I think, in saying criminalising parents would lead to more children being condemned to ‘care’, a far worse punishment than the occasional slap at home. Children are generally treated far ‘better’ than they were when I was a child, yet I see far more insidious ways than hitting, making children deeply unsettled and unhappy than ever we were, mostly perpetrated by other children and by the break-up of parents. May I suggest, with all humility, that these other factors are more important now, and our energies put to trying to ameliorate these?
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Thanks, Roger, we will have to agree to disagree on this. Essentially, this isn’t about judging parents. It’s really about improving the way we respond to things in the context of parenting. I know when I get upset with my son and I shout at him, I’m not doing it because it’s best for him, I’m doing it because I’m tired and stressed and can’t summon the patience to acknowledge his limitations with the respect and dignity he deserves, as someone with less life experience than me. It makes no sense to shout at or hit a child. And says it more about us as adults, and the fear we have that taking away this incredibly impactful violence will somehow make us impotent in our homes. It won’t. All it does is tell our children that the people who say they love them ultimately can’t deliver the kind of love we know in our hearts we need, and this affects us all in different ways. I’m glad you don’t feel impacted by being hit, but I’m sad to read you think you deserved it. No child deserves to be hit, not even if they intentionally misbehave. As an adult, you know the child is only misbehaving to push boundaries. If we react with violence, we’re effectively telling kids that exploration is always a negative thing. And it’s not.
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It’s perfectly natural, Natasha, to be tired and stressed! And it is perfectly natural to lose patience – and children innately know this. We are only human, we fail all the time, and the child will push the boundaries to see how and at what point we react. I think you’re putting the bar too high for us, (and perhaps yourself). We are all different and have our different levels of tolerance and patience. Even Jesus lost his patience occasionally!
If we all behaved perfectly, what a boring world it would be. At heart we are animals, our ‘civilized’ behaviour is but a thin veneer. Most animals will cuff their young if they misbehave and we shouldn’t distance ourselves too far from our roots. As children, we regarded being smacked as normal for bad behaviour. Not one of my contemporaries thought of it as ‘abuse’. At school, if we were caned, we tended to wear it as a badge of pride! We all watched cowboy films on the telly (in black-and-white), and enacted them out on the back yard, but it hasn’t made us sadist thugs – we knew it was fantasy, and fun. Has it given me a hatred of ‘Native Americans’? Of course not. I know it’s unfashionable, but I do think it was a healthier environment for us than sat playing games on a computer screen much of the day. And, forgive me Natasha, we explored a lot more in the real world (despite being hit) than many children are able or willing to do today. Exploring boundaries was certainly not a negative thing for us.
As you say, we must agree to disagree on this, but I would like to try and illustrate that parents who (occasionally) use a slap to restrain or chide children are not necessarily criminal people. And most children are resilient; a slap does not last very long – unlike some of the long-winded explanations that some parents and teachers bore kids to death with. Don’t be sad that I think I deserved a smack – it was understood. If we crossed certain boundaries, that was the result. We knew that and accepted it. The important part was not getting caught, rather than not crossing those boundaries!
I was hit quite a lot. I also had a great childhood, much freer than most children have today, and had a lot more fun too. It was carefree. It was worth the smacking to have that, and being very much involved with children, still, today I wouldn’t want to swap my childhood for theirs.
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“Hitting, or smacking children as we call it, is still allowed in England and Wales”.
Generally i think smacking children should be banned but while its not an offence unless it leave bruises ,cuts or scratches then the SS should have no business removing children and trying to criminalize parents for what they call physical abuse. by the time the parents get to court the Judge is looking down at them like they are Scum.
Punishment without Crime is a real phenomenon.But only in the Family courts.
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Well said Roger and also Dr Manhatten .Nothing more for me to add !
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