Risk of children coming last again as “Family First” promotes referendum to overturn no-smacking law at this year’s election

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Both my mother and father regularly smacked their children. Well, it was more than “smacking.” My mother laid into us with the cane end of a feather duster, a stick, even a washing machine hose. As an additional punishment she forced us to drink castor oil, which tasted ghastly and caused violent diarrhoea. My father only used his hand, or his fists, and only when he had been drinking. You always knew when he was about to lash out because it invariably followed him saying: “I’m not drunk, I’m perfectly sober, I wouldn’t touch you with a 40-foot barge pole with a dog’s tool on the end of it.” I can’t remember we ever did anything particularly wrong to attract these beatings. We were just children. We were just there. It’s what parents did in those days, the 1960s and 1970s.

According to some schools of psychiatry, psychology and sociology, I ought to have grown up to “smack” my own children, but I never did. Neither of their parents has hit any of them, not even once. This doesn’t require any Herculean effort of self-control. The thought of striking a defenceless child is completely repugnant to me. If they’re really naughty, some time in their bedroom or removal of some privilege has been enough to impress on them not to do it again. Maybe this complete absence of any thought, let alone desire, to do violence to a child is a perverse adult rebellion against behaving like my parents. Whatever it is, not hitting children is as common today among the wide circle of parents I know as hitting them was when I was a child. There is not a single parent personally known to me who hits their children. This is a fundamental change in society that has taken place in my lifetime, like the fundamental change in attitude towards violence against women. Few men assault their women partners these days, either, but when I was a child it was something so common that I saw it happen regularly. The police would not do anything, because the act of a man beating his wife was known as “a domestic” and no business of the law. Today the police immediately arrest any man who uses violence against a woman, and a good thing, too. And since last June, with the passing of Green MP Sue Bradford’s Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act, parents have no longer had the defence in law of using force against their children for the purposes of correction or punishment.

The campaign against the repeal of the former Section 59 defence was the most extreme I have witnessed in New Zealand politics since the campaign against Fran Wilde’s Homosexual Law Reform Act of 1986. The vehemence with which many people demanded their continued right to hit children was often sickenly violent in its language and attitude. The supporters of “smacking” children demonised members of Parliament and ordinary citizens who spoke out in the defence of children. As happened in the campaign against homosexual law reform, Christian fundamentalists joined forces with secular political conservatives to wage what resembled at times a war against changing the law. To them, children seemed viewed as some kind of property, chattels, to be dealt with as the (usually male) parent saw fit. It was like the archaic legal view of a wife as the property of the husband. Until National leader John Key changed his mind and fell in behind change, there were times it looked unlikely Bradford’s bill would get the numbers to pass.

The legal issue seemed to me to be quite simple. Why should the law allow me to hit my own children, yet if I walked to my front gate and hit some other child, I would be arrested? It was legally bizarre. There should be no exception to the principle of “one law for all” and equal protection for all under the law. But there were also pressing, real reasons for changing this anomaly. Section 59 had allowed some parents in high-profile court cases to escape conviction despite having committed violent assaults with weapons on their children. Juries had bought defence lawyers’ arguments that Section 59 covered such assaults.

More than six months on, the sky has not fallen. Parents have not been rounded up and prosecuted at the whim of the police and vengeful children, as that Orwellianly named organisation Family First claimed would happen. On December 20, the police published a review of their activity in this area in the three months following the passing of the law. It found that police attended a total of 111 child assault “events,” 15 of which involved “smacking” and “minor acts of physical discipline.” That represented a small increase on the three months period prior to the law change, during which police attended 95 child assault “events,” 13 of which involved “smacking” and “minor acts of physical discipline.” There were no prosecutions in either period.

Of course, the law change has not prevented some children still being murdered and it absurd to say its supporters claimed it ever would. But some opponents seem to take great delight each time a child is killed, saying it is somehow the law’s fault. Family First, alongside the former United Future MP Larry Baldock who now goes under the banner of Future New Zealand, are busy organising a petition seeking a referendum at this year’s general election to try to overturn the law. The proposed referendum would have two questions:

• Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?
• Should the Government give urgent priority to understanding and addressing the wider causes of family breakdown, family violence and child abuse in New Zealand?

The organisers say they already have 250,000 signatures and need to get only 50,000 more by March to ensure a referendum is held. If they really are gathering signatures at this rate, then they will succeed. Citizen-initiated referendums held this way are not binding on Parliament, unlike the government-sponsored kind that led to the adoption of MMP, for example. Even should a majority of voters support Baldock’s referendum, heaven forbid, it might not lead to the law being reversed. Sue Bradford says it is highly unlikely it will be repealed, citing a “clear shift in public attitudes away from smacking and hitting children” that would make a future Parliament unwilling to revoke the law. I hope she is right. Children deserve better than the harsh, narrow, medieval property-rights view of them promoted by Larry Baldock and Family First.

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Tags: Family First, smacking