Children’s Commissioner: ‘Axe legal defence of reasonable chastisement’

Parents who lightly discipline their children should be subject to prosecution, the Children’s Commissioner for England has said.

Speaking to The Observer, Dame Rachel de Souza suggested that parents cannot be trusted to discipline their own children and called for the legal defence of reasonable chastisement to be removed from the statute books.

Following Dame Rachel’s remarks, the Department for Education confirmed it is looking closely at smacking bans in Wales and Scotland with a view to backing a similar change in the law in England.

Unnecessary

Despite admitting that there are “already protections for children enshrined in law in England”, de Souza said it is now time “to go further”.

The Children’s Commissioner claimed that a “ban on smacking is a necessary step to keep children safe and to stop lower-level violence from escalating”.

In response, Be Reasonable spokesman Simon Calvert said: “There are lots of parents who know that tapping a tot on the behind to help them understand the importance of listening to mummy and daddy is one of the many techniques good parents use as part of raising healthy kids.

“The Children’s Commissioner should be focussing on kids who are being badly parented, not kids who are being well-parented.”

Cynical conflation

Likening the alleged abuse and murder of Sara Sharif at the hands of family members to the light discipline of a parent, Observer journalist Catherine Bennett backed Dame Rachel’s call for parents who use reasonable chastisement to face the possibility of prosecution.

But Mr Calvert told the newspaper: “Bennett cynically conflates the appalling abuse suffered by ten-year-old Sara Sharif, with a loving parent tapping a tot on the back of the legs.

“Some would sooner see loving parents turned into criminals than accept that mums and dads can tell the difference between reasonable chastisement and child abuse.

“It is rightly illegal to physically harm a child. Child abuse is strongly dealt with under existing criminal law: no one has ever pointed to a case of genuine child abuse that has gone to court and been dismissed as ‘mere smacking’.”

‘Call 999’

The Scottish Government came under fire for instructing people to call 999 on parents when it banned smacking in 2020, and the Welsh Government spent around £2.7 million publicising its own ban introduced in 2022.

De Souza has previously expressed admiration for the ban in Wales, stating in 2022: “I would be supportive – certainly, from what I’ve seen so far – I would be supportive if our government decided to do the same”.

In a poll of almost 4,000 adults in Great Britain conducted by YouGov earlier this year, 60 per cent said parents ‘probably should not’ or ‘definitely should not’ be criminalised if they choose to smack their children. Only 30 per cent said they should, while the remainder responded ‘don’t know’.