The truth hurts
“I was abused as a child and much of it was within the law” says CHILDREN 1ST Ambassador Damian Barr.
He never hit me in front of my mum. When he started leaving marks they were in places my pals and teachers wouldn’t be looking. But I knew exactly where. Sometimes, when he enjoyed himself too much, I’d have a black eye to explain away so I began acting clumsy, falling over in gym so the questions would stop. When I started swimming classes he had to get more creative.
The bruises left by my mother’s very ex-boy friend are long gone but will never heal completely. It took me many years to accept I’d been abused. I very much doubt the man who went on to almost drown me in the bath considered himself an abuser then or now. He was always careful to tell me why I was getting ‘smacked’: I was late from school, I had the telly on too loud, I disrespected him. And I believed him.
Much of what he did was actually within the law. The UK remains one of only five countries in the EU that has not yet banned the assault of children. Our current laws contravene the UN Rights of the Child. It’s a nasty club to be in. But where does so-called ‘smacking’ end and abuse begin?
Section 51 of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 provides a defence of ‘justifiable assault’, where it is claimed that something done to a child was a physical punishment carried out in exercise of a parental right. It’s the: ‘I hit him to stop him running out in front of a car ’ clause. It’s for your own good, you see. Discipline. You can’t hit someone else’s child unless you’ve been given per mission by their parents.
In England ‘reasonable punishment’ is permitted but you can’t leave a mark. What is reasonable? How often and how hard is okay ? How easily do you bruise? Leaving a mark is Actual Bodily Harm but it is up to the child to recognise this and then report their parent. Perhaps, not surprisingly, this doesn’t happen very often. In 2003 Scotland finally banned: blows to the head, hitting with an implement (such as a belt) and shaking. But every thing else is still okay.
There is a clear link between smacking and abuse. Civilised Sweden was one of the first to introduce a ban in 1979 with the slogan Never Violence. Since then 44 countries have followed with a further 45 set to reform. In Sweden corporal punishment has dramatically decreased as has support for it and so have the number of child deaths from abuse. In the USA , mothers who report that they or their partner spanked their child in the past year are nearly three times more likely to state that they also used harsher forms of punishment than those who say their child was not spanked, according to a 2008 study by the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Such punishments included beating, burning and kicking.
Smacking and spanking are toxic euphemisms. Let ’s call it what it is: hitting. It is not harmless and it is not effective at anything other than perpetuating a culture of violence.
A review of 88 studies by Columbia University concluded that although punishing children physically often means immediate compliance with parental demands, this “good behaviour” was rarely maintained long term as children failed to internalise moral norms and social rules.
I have just became a patron of CHILDREN 1ST, founded as the RSSPCC in 1884 (you see, this problem hasn’t gone away). Last year they supported more than 559 children, young people, parents and carers recover from the trauma of physical, sexual, domestic and emotional abuse and of neglect. They say: “We regularly have calls to ParentLine Scotland from parents upset because they have hit their child. They say they feel guilty and ashamed. They tell us they acted out of fear, anger and lack of confidence in other parenting methods. They worry it will come between them and their children.” Hitting hurts everyone involved.
The Children’s Commissioner for England has claimed our pets enjoy more protection. Witness the outrage at the handler of the Scottish terrier who won Crufts this year for lifting her dog by the tail. The Kennel Club had told Rebecca Cross this was unacceptable. Mrs Cross said: “I didn’t do it on purpose, it was just habit. It’s just one of those things.” A petition against her now has more than 50,000 signatures. Visit any busy shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll see children being treated this roughly and worse. No petitions for them. No protection for them. Do we really care more for terriers than toddlers?
At an audience earlier this year Pope Francis outlined the traits of a good father, telling a tale to illustrate. “One time,” he said, “ I heard a father in a meeting with married couples say, ‘I sometimes have to smack my children a bit but never in the face so as not to humiliate them’.” The Pope then added: “How beautiful. He knows the sense of dignity! He has to punish them but does it justly and moves on.”
Never in the face. How beautiful! How just! We all entertain fantasies of violence – how many times have you thought about doing your boss in or ploughing into the slow driver in front? But, for the most part, we manage our feelings and restrain ourselves from hitting other adults. Yet when it comes to our children it’s somehow okay to lose it. We accept the kinds of excuses that normally get the domestic violence alarm bells ringing: it was for her own good, she needed to learn, she made me do it.
Removing the ‘justifiable assault ’ and ‘reasonable punishment’ defences would not create new criminal offences. It would simply give children the same legal protection already enjoyed by their parents. Fewer bruises for all.
Damian Barr is a journalist and author of 'Maggie and Me.' This article was first published in the Big Issue in March 2015. CHILDREN 1ST Chairs the Scottish branch of Children are Unbeatable, a group of organisations working to end the lawful physical punishment of children in the UK.