Support has doubled for the Government to ban smacking, with 170 cross party MPs in favour. There is also growing international pressure for a smacking ban.
It would be interesting to know what effect this has had on parenting in countries where the ban is enforced, including Austria, Norway, Sweden Croatia and Latvia. How many parents have been prosecuted and what was their punishment? What long term impact did this have on their family life? I would like to know these answers.
Of course our young and vulnerable must be protected against violence – and they already are by our present legal system, their parents can be reported to Social Services and they can be prosecuted.
If a ban is introduced, I believe those poor children with cruel, bullying parents will still be too afraid to report them and will continue lying to cover up their injuries. Their teachers are trained to look out for warning signs and protection is available for them.
On the other hand, there will be children who will taunt their parents about how they will report them if they touch them, they will run them ragged with threatening to call the police if they lay a finger on them. It is so easy to become bruised and an attention seeking child can fabricate a convincing yarn around this. These are my concerns.
Unless the parent is a bully, I imagine smacking is a last resort because they are tired and stressed, even Tony Blair has admitted resorting to this. An over tired child is deaf to everything a parent says and cannot be reasoned with, though I understand how terrifying it must be for them to be struck by an adult.
Like Nanny Knows Best, I had a “naughty step”, but am afraid to admit I did occasionaly resort to the “short, sharp slap” on the bottom. You can Nanny’s advice on good parenting from the link. Were you smacked as a child? Is it something you do to your offspring?
Is raising children one of the enumerated powers of government in the United Kingdom?
How about they start legislating for common sense?
Its obvious that sometimes one has to smack a child, and excessive and regular beatings should be punished. Its really going too far to ban smacking completly.
Bloody political correctness gone mad.
For those who don’t know, Michelle has a legal background.
Michelle, is there a smacking ban in Australia? I know it is something the UN wants introduced globally.
It seems this is another one of those example where Labour’s intent is noble but it fails to see (a) already existing legilsation that is not enforced, or (b) the practical realities of what is prorposes is fundamentally flawed.
Take knives as another example. The plan is to make it a crime for under 16’s to buy knives (rather than it just being a crime for a vendor to sell the knife), this is supposedly going to tackle the rising problem of children carrying knives. However, it’s already an offence to carry an offensive weapon for people of any age, making the creation of a new crime of buying a knife utterly pointless.
The knives issue really worries me. It’s the culture with a small minority that is at fault and legislation won’t change that, these people know it’s wrong and illegal to carry knives, but still do it and have killed innocent people too. I do worry about my sons going out and meeting up with the wrong crowd who are high on something or other, they are always telling me I am too protective.
Dizzy hits the nail squarely on the head again.
A propos smacking, I was smacked as a child but have no recollection of it. I made it a policy not to smack my children when they still lived with me, my feeling being that if a child cannot be reasoned with then it cannot understand the difference between right and wrong. Therefore to apply force would not be right.
The nearest I ever got to smacking my eldest (3 at the time) was when he hit one of his friends for no apparent reason. I took him to one side and asked him to remember how it had felt when he had fallen down the stairs and how much that had hurt, and then asked him to consider what he had done and to apologise. He seemed to take on board the lesson, although I would add that it was a lot easier for my wife and I than for some families as we were both working from home and one could take over from the other when the end of the tether had been reached….
I do not regard smacking as being automatically wrong, and it is certainly not an area for legislative meddling, but maybe I was just lucky in my dealings with my small people.
Croydonian, it sounds like you are a role model father. Lucky kids – and wife.
A ban on smacking is, quite possibly, one of the most ridiculous potential laws I have ever seen.
Labour need to get out of people’s lives. If parents want to smack children, then that’s their business, not the state.
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Ellee – very kind of you to say so. My ex-wife thinks I’m the Devil Incarnate – but that’s marital breakdown for you.
The trouble with today’s younger generation is that they have little respect for authority, especially teachers.
When I was at Grammar school, the teachers were generally very strict and the ultimate punishment was the slipper, or in severe cases a trip to the Headmaster for a caning. The result was that we had respect for our teachers and we knew just how far we could go with each of them. The softer teachers were given a very hard time and did not have the respect of the boys. I beleive that right to smack their children should not be taken away from parents and that schools should be given the right to use more traditional methods of pubishment. Perhaps then we will start to see some improvements in the behaviour of the youth of today. Stephen
My mum always said “children, like dinosaurs, have two brains. If you can’t get through to one in the head you must occasionally speak to the one in the bottom”
Surely smacking, as part of a normal process of chastisement in a loving family is fine?
Abuse is already punishable, but that law is not enforced. Do we want the agencies involved with the Victoria Climbe debacle poking their noses into loving homes and, as a result ignoring the more difficult cases?
This is just another leftist assault on the freedom and independence of the family.
Pursuing parents who slap their children in a supermarket reduces the resources available to tackle parents who batter their children in private.