Front of my mind as I raced along the pavement was this: what if I don’t catch up with him in time? He was awfully fast for a four-year-old. My godson, possessed by a nuclear tantrum, had wriggled from my hand-hold while his mother fumbled with front-door key and baby brother, and was haring along the street towards the busy main road. As we approached the speeding cars, my only option was to rugby tackle him to a stop. His head hit the pavement with a crack. As I carried him, howling and thrashing, back home I was sure that his tears were as much related to a sore head as an injured ego. But sometimes, with children, brawn wins over brain.
As childcare methods have
developed, diversified and cleaved to the social anxieties of the hour, one seam has remained constant. Some subjects succeed in tying up a host of disparate ancient and contemporary concerns with a bow, and one of them is smacking.
Earlier this week the Council of Europe — which monitors compliance with the European convention on human rights — berated Britain for having failed to introduce a smacking ban more than a decade after a ruling that the practice violated children’s right to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment. It’s not the first time that Britain has been criticised over smacking and it won’t be the last time that such criticism has been blithely ignored. But, as the council steps up its campaign against physical punishment, it may well be that in coming months, defensive outrage is no longer an option.
That smacking is a stratospherically emotive issue, entrenched in generational and cultural expectations, is self-evident. It’s curious too how responses to physical chastisement are now conveniently metered by class. Indeed, there seems to be a special supermarket aisle reserved for liberal commentators to observe a woman not of their breeding slapping her child. Voltaire’s apocryphal phrasing of disapproving, but defending to the death your right, has transmogrified into a belief that smacking must be all right because those chavs can’t help themselves, while the intelligentsia at least search their souls afterwards.
{{/usCountry}}That smacking is a stratospherically emotive issue, entrenched in generational and cultural expectations, is self-evident. It’s curious too how responses to physical chastisement are now conveniently metered by class. Indeed, there seems to be a special supermarket aisle reserved for liberal commentators to observe a woman not of their breeding slapping her child. Voltaire’s apocryphal phrasing of disapproving, but defending to the death your right, has transmogrified into a belief that smacking must be all right because those chavs can’t help themselves, while the intelligentsia at least search their souls afterwards.
{{/usCountry}}Penalising parents
And yet it would be entirely feasible to institute a smacking ban in this country that didn’t penalise parents for reasonable interventions. Simply changing the “reasonable chastisement” defence against common assault to “reasonable restraint” would remove the covert approval of physical punishment while acknowledging the right to use force to stop a child darting into the path of a 4x4.
But, just as social acceptance of domestic violence against women has shifted over the last few decades, so the Victorian hangover that considers children to be chattels and beatable as such might be changed by a concerted legal intervention.
We cannot rely on benign self-regulation by parents alone. Smacking is assault, however you dress it up. It brings with it all the guilt, shame and assumptions of weakness and power that come with any attack on another human. The victim is in this case a smaller person, but still a person. Whether practically enforcible or otherwise, the message that such assaults will no longer be tolerated is needed to prompt a complete cultural revision of attitudes to children that goes far beyond the Naughty Step. And this generation of legislators must surely be the first to acknowledge that, even if beating did them no harm, it certainly did them no good.
–The Guardian