If smacking were child abuse, most parents would be criminals

COMMENT

Picture a mother. She’s just taken her three kids with her to the supermarket to get the weekly shop. She’s now faced with a screaming toddler who refuses to get back into his car seat. No amount of chiding or cajoling makes any difference. Eventually she resorts to picking him up, wrestling him in and fastening the seatbelt.

She gets home and breathes a sigh of relief when the overtired tot finally goes down for his nap. Then there’s a knock at the door. It’s the police. She’s been accused of abusing her children and they’re here to investigate.

This is now a very real possibility in Wales, where ‘reasonable chastisement’ was recently outlawed. By definition, that means that certain forms of reasonable behaviour are now criminal. Behaviour such as smacking, or wrestling a child into a car seat. Unreasonable chastisement – the kind of actions which do harm children – was rightly, already illegal.

This hasn’t stopped some, such as Jawad Iqbal, using wild rhetoric to conflate reasonable chastisement with abuse. They call it ‘assault’, ‘beating’ and ‘domestic violence’. But smacking is none of those things. It is a gentle tap on the back of the hand or legs. A swift correction – a reminder not to do something again.

Smacking is not abuse. If it were, then the vast majority of parents in this country would be child abusers, given that 85 per cent of us were smacked as children. Even the Welsh Government’s own study reluctantly admitted there was simply no evidence to show that a mild, occasional smack – the sort which has just been made a criminal offence – was harmful.

Whatever your view on the rights and wrongs of smacking, ask yourself, should those who take a different view be criminalised? Time and again polls find three-quarters of us say ‘No’. Most think social workers and the police already have enough to do without investigating good families. Parents and children deserve better.

Astonishingly, the ban-peddlers want you to believe that criminalisation will not result in parents being given criminal records! That was certainly what parents in Wales were told. But the PR machine has changed tack now the law is here, and the public are told to dial 999 if they suspect a parent of smacking their child. Wales, like Scotland, is following the path of New Zealand where a dad had his two boys taken away after being convicted of lightly smacking them. The conviction was quashed, but by then the damage had been done.

The Welsh Government, like the Scottish Government before it, has said loud and clear: ‘We don’t trust parents.’ Westminster needs to say: ‘But we do.’

A version of this article first appeared in TCW The Conservative Woman and is reproduced with permission.

This week, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi told Times Radio: “My very strong view is that actually we have got to trust parents on this and parents being able to discipline their children is something that they should be entitled to do. We have got to just make sure we don’t end up in a world where the state is nannying people about how they bring up their children.” Read more here.