Dialogue: Maybe it's time to put primitive parenting in past

By JOHN ROUGHAN

My mother was at home in a country schoolhouse with five children and sometimes, when one or another was testing the limits, she'd reach for the hearthbrush. We barely remember, but she does.

Years later, when she went into a career that made good use of a prodigious capacity for compassion and insight to human behaviour, she was mortified by the memory. We still tease her about it, letting her know that the hearthbrush worries her much more than it ever hurt us.

Raising our own children we marvelled at the code of non-violence their grandparents gently urged on us. Not that any of us were much given to smacking but, you know, we reserved the right.

Now I am not so sure. It is easy to say so, with the family well past childhood, but I am beginning to think she is right. Perhaps the Government should remove the clause in the Crimes Act that allows parents to assault their children.

It has been quietly thinking of doing that for the past year or two but appears to have lost the nerve, at least this side of the election.

Its reason for raising the question was never the most compelling. It wanted to improve New Zealand's compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The guardians of the convention have long criticised Section 59 of the Crimes Act that provides a defence against a charge of assault for parents, or anyone acting in the place of a parent, provided the force used is "reasonable in the circumstances".

Though the law does not define what is "reasonable", public opinion has no difficulty doing so. A survey of 1000 adults, conducted for the Ministry of Justice last year, found 80 per cent believed a smack with an open hand was fine.

Only 15 per cent thought it okay to use an instrument such as a belt or wooden spoon. Almost nobody (0.4 per cent) approved of a heavier weapon, such as a piece of wood and, most gratifying, very few (1.3 per cent) thought it all right to smack a child around the head or neck.

Given that sample of common sense, the Government decided to leave well enough alone. But there is a reason, I think, to be a little more courageous.

Sometimes legislation is more valuable in the transmission than the enforcement. It is at least conceivable that an act to repeal the parental right to violence could be an antidote to some of the appalling child abuse that has come to light in recent years.

Right now, in those wretched households where children are brutally controlled, the law gives just one message: that you are allowed to hit kids in your care.

They will never hear the caveat, "provided the force is reasonable in the circumstances". Hardly any households have heard it, but most don't need the law to spell that out.

In fact most don't need a law on the subject at all. In fraught moments, hopefully rare, they will resort to reasonable force regardless of what the law may say, and nobody is likely to interfere.

But in the dangerous homes, where the word "reasonable" is probably unknown, one message would get through: that the law now says it is not okay to hit your kids. The offenders might not obey it, but they will know that much. It would be better than the message they receive now.

The intensity of the argument that would accompany any such proposal would penetrate the dimmest recesses of the culture of parental violence, which, by the way, cannot be racially defined.

The Justice Ministry's survey found more approval of smacking among Europeans (82 per cent) than Maori (73 per cent) or Pacific Islanders (69 per cent), although a higher proportion of Islanders (27 per cent) tolerated the use of belts, wooden spoons and the like, probably because 30 per cent of them supported the physical punishment of teenagers as old as 15 to 17.

Isn't this an unpleasant subject? That is why, I suspect, a courageous proposal to change the law could have a good chance of success.

An 80 per cent vote for smacking sounds like the sort of consensus no sensible Government would challenge. Yet sometimes a consensus is paper-thin. This poll records a casual opinion, not the strength of commitment to it.

This subject is so distasteful that defenders of smacking are at a distinct disadvantage in debate. They typically start with a great deal of righteous fury but soon sound more than a little sick.

They typically invoke the thrashings they received in childhood, attesting that it did them a world of good, and presume to speak for their poor children, insisting the kids appreciate a firm hand.

It is hard to read and hear this sort of thing without feeling decidedly queasy. And you begin to agree with those who say the violence is not for the good of the child but for the release of parental frustration.

The last resort of the smacking lobby is the electric socket theory in which the smack is not really punishment at all, and no parent would be prosecuted for it.

Announcing the Government's inaction for the time being, Justice Minister Phil Goff said: "It is likely that eventually public attitudes will move towards repealing the legal sanctioning of smacking, as has happened in most European countries."

It could happen more easily than he thinks. At the appearance of a bill there would be a thoroughly useful eruption of outrage, loud enough to let everyone know what is happening. Then, the family advisory industry would attract attention and the law, once changed, could help to consign primitive parenting to the past.