Opening the Conversation - Smacking and the Rights of a Child

Arup Sinha

Can there ever be enough articles about The Slap,  or The Smack?  Channel 9 show 60 Minutes re-ignited an ongoing conversation adults are having in Australia about whether it is okay to use corporal punishment with children.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - Corporal Punishment

Article 19 states that children have the right to be protected from being hurt and mistreated, mentally and physically. Governments are obliged to make sure that children are properly cared for and protected from violence.  Article 37 states that nobody is allowed to punish children in a cruel or harmful way.  And Articles 4 and 42 state that governments should let children know about their human rights.

So - what would children say about the suggestion that we, as parents or as facilitator, have the “right” to smack, slap or hit a child? Are we prepared to listen and take this into account when we have a conversation on corporal punishment?

Even if there is no permanent physical harm done from a single instance of corporal punishment – can we justify smacking when we know it hurts a child, when we know there are other effective parenting techniques, and when we know that a small minority of parents do take physical punishment too far?

I think we have to keep talking about this – I don’t think it’s good enough to simply say “I was smacked as a child and I am fine.” The discussion has to be broader than our own experience of smacking and extend to the need to protect all children – including the minority of children who may be with parents who are in fact harming them.

Look at this video -

Research and Opinions of Children on Smacking and Hitting Children

I have taken this quote from (CLICK IT)a document produced for children to read, by Save the Children  - it’s really worth a look and perhaps a discussion with your older children:

     Corporal punishment hurts physically and emotionally, and it can be very humiliating, too. Research on children’s feelings and thoughts about corporal punishment is now being done all over the world. In this research, children are telling adults that it does hurt, a lot.  The biggest piece of research is the UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children.  In 2006, Professor Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, who led the study, wrote:

    ‘Throughout the study process, children have consistently expressed the urgent need to stop all this violence. Children testify to the hurt – not only physical, but ‘the hurt inside’ – which this violence causes them, compounded by adult acceptance, even approval, of it. Governments need to accept that this is indeed an emergency, although it is not a new emergency. Children have suffered violence at the hands of adults unseen and unheard for centuries. But now that the scale and impact of violence against children is becoming visible, they cannot be kept waiting any longer for the effective protection to which they have an unqualified right.’

And this:

      A different piece of research found that two parents out of five who had hit their children had used a different degree of force than they meant to. This means that they might have hit their children much harder than they meant to. Obviously, this could be very dangerous – children, especially babies and small children, could get seriously hurt.

And this:

In almost all the countries that have banned all corporal punishment, most adults did not agree at first – but once the law was made, many more people changed their minds and began to think that corporal punishment was wrong. In a few years’ time, adults will look back and be amazed – and ashamed – that once some people thought it was OK to hit children.