Shame on those who defend ‘the loving smack’ – it’s just plain violence against children

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/06/shame-on-those-who-defend-loving-smack-plain-violence-against-children

Version 0 of 1.

Back in 2012 – around the same time, it appears, that he was starting his tech lessons with Jennifer Arcuri – Boris Johnson, as mayor of London, reached out to anxious smackers.

Following the 2011 London riots, some parents, including the Tottenham MP David Lammy, thought Labour’s 2004 restrictions on hitting might be partly to blame for the disorder. These constraints, Lammy said, meant his constituents “no longer feel sovereign in their own homes”. Johnson, agreeing, said: “People do feel anxious about imposing discipline on their children, whether the law will support them. I think parents should be seen as the natural figures of authority in this respect.” Bear in mind this was ages before we had got to know his more prominent parent, minor celebrity Stanley Johnson, or witnessed the pointed absence of Johnson Jr’s own children at moments of career glory, so it probably came across quite differently. Johnson added: “There should be a clear statement from the government that the benefit of the doubt should always be given to parents.”

Assuming Dominic Cummings approves and Johnson himself has not, since 2012, decided that children deserve the same protection as animals, that recently acquired enthusiasm of his, there is reason for pro-smacking organisations – these do, really, exist – to hope. With Johnson, the parent-assailant’s friend, at the helm, maybe the new Scottish ban on hitting children, bringing it into line with most EU member nations, will not lead to similar protections for English, Welsh and Northern Irish minors.

While the rest of the world moves on, the ancient right to physically punish an infant – being scrupulously careful, of course, not to bruise, graze or over-redden tender skin – could yet endure as another proud token of UK or, in particular, English, exceptionalism.

It must help, too, that at least one leading Johnson sibling has acknowledged the bracing role of corporal punishment in their early lives. Boris Johnson’s mother – the “equal worth of every human being” paragon abruptly invoked in his conference speech – was also, according to his sister Rachel, a spirited disciplinarian. Following one minor prank: “My mother stormed out into the garden and chased us until we fell to the ground, then she went about us with a stick as we lay laughing in the grass.” She, in turn, has smacked “and I can honestly say that it didn’t do me or my children in turn any harm”.

While we can’t be sure of the prime minister’s own smacking credentials, his willingness to hurl his prodigious bulk at small children in notionally friendly kickabouts indicates a promising disregard for both their fragility and feelings. And David Cameron recalls, from the idyllic, pre-Brexit days, the time when he had to stop the footy at Chequers, Johnson having hurt his own son: “There was a little crunch.”

But before the prime minister gets to take all the credit, it’s important to recognise the efforts made by the Labour party, well before Johnson’s intervention, to ensure that children, unlike adults, should not be afforded protection from violence in British homes. Or, at least, from what Labour’s apologists sometimes called “a loving smack”.

No religious fundamentalists (“The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame”) could have been more determined than Labour in defying, among bodies opposed to corporal punishment by parents, children’s commissioners, the NSPCC, the Council of Europe, a children’s march, the UN committee on the rights of the child. Current UK law, now with the exception of Scotland, still breaches article 19 of the UN convention on the rights of the child, protecting children “from all forms of physical or mental violence”. In 2008, Labour saw off an amendment, from Kevin Barron, the Labour chair of the Commons health committee, that would have anticipated Scotland’s prohibition. The then children’s minister, Beverley Hughes, said the party would not “make smacking a crime and criminalise decent parents for a mild smack”.

The ancient right to physically punish an infant could yet endure as yet another proud token of English exceptionalism

Identically threadbare arguments – as if the courts and police stations in 57 more enlightened countries were daily submerged beneath doting hand-tappers – have been heard in recent years from MPs and other bodies opposing the Scottish ban, notwithstanding ever more compelling, evidence-based arguments for legislative leadership. John Finnie, the Green MSP who brought forward the new law on behalf of a coalition of children’s charities, last week cited research indicating – maybe not that surprisingly – that physical chastisement, as well as being useless and setting a terrible example, harms children as they grow up and into adult life. The “loving smack”, we learn, is no exception. “Childhood physical punishment,” Dr Tamasin Knight briefed MSPs, “is linked to adult aggression and antisocial behaviour, including aggression and sexual violence within intimate partner relationships.”

With pro-smackers already organising – stand by for, among others, BBC thinker Anne Atkins and assorted religious literalists, along with Westminster’s nanny-state obsessives – it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect the Scottish advance to expedite a similar freedom from attack for English children (a ban in Wales looks imminent). The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill, recently heard inciting riots, has already testified, re Scotland, that he was repeatedly smacked: “And damn I needed it.” No harm done. “If you tell me my parents assaulted me, it’s very possible I will assault you.”

And if it would be preposterous to imagine that the prime minister, currently yelling about surrender, banging his pudgy fists on lecterns and picturing the Speaker “forced” to eat a kangaroo’s testicle, suffered any lasting harm from his thrashings, parental and pedagogic, the impressive research that helped bring about Scotland’s new law suggests that not every recipient of loving smacks is so fortunate. Why would they be? No one would make a similar claim for adult survivors of domestic rage or violence. Harm is done. Unless certain parts of the UK do, indeed, confer a very special kind of child immunity.