Smacking ban campaigner bows out

No one was ever going to die of surprise when Beth Wood turned out to be a do-gooder. It was destiny.

She grew up on remote Pacific islands, sick with malaria, the daughter of an Anglican mission doctor whose home was filled with the sick and hungry and who dispensed compassion by the potful.

Hers is not the sort of story that usually gets told because it is so entirely unsurprising that she has led a life of goodwill and sacrifice. What sets Woods apart is the cause she chose to fight.

The girl who was never laid a hand on by her parents grew up to become New Zealand's leading campaigner against the smacking of children.

For the past 16 years she has fought that fight with the fervour you would expect of a survivor of the most hideous childhood abuse.

She has lived and breathed it, scheming, plotting, lobbying, and pestering until almost all child-focussed agencies in New Zealand have taken up the cause, and the only people left to win over are politicians and some parents.

And now, as MPs are finally debating whether to make smacking against the law - when she has got as close as she ever has to seeing her dream come true - Woods is bowing out.

At nearly 65, Beth Woods is a tiny wisp of a woman, five foot nothing if she is lucky - so small and unobtrusive that it's hard to imagine she has caused such a fuss.

Yet she is supposedly the scourge of the fundamentalist Christian right and talkback callers - the eccentric nutter, they say, intent on telling good, loving families how to run their lives.

She speaks fast, but carefully. Wood is not one for verbosity, for description, not one for drama. She doesn't pick fights, not publicly at least: that would be too much like grandstanding.

But her convictions are clear.

No, parents do not have the right to raise children how they see fit, if how they see fit involves violence.

"We need to respect children more and regard them as people more," she says. "It's not OK to hit anyone else, so it should not be OK to hit children.

"Oh, I'm sure they think I'm nuts," she continues, her deeply-set eyes twinkling for a moment. "If they don't think you're nuts, I'm often asked 'why do you bother, why are you doing this?'

"Then there are people who think you're just plain wrong, deluded, or that the issue isn't as big as you make it."

But as far as Wood sees it, the issue is huge.

She wants Section 59 of the Crimes Act, repealed - removed from the statutes forever.

She believes that would have a major effect on New Zealand's appalling rate of child abuse.

Section 59 makes it legal for parents to smack their children. Technically, the section sets out a defence to the charge of assault and allows parents to use "reasonable force" to discipline their children.

Without that defence, it would be against the law to hit children in any circumstance - the same way it is against the law now to hit adults or pets.

A bill drafted by Green MP Sue Bradford, which a committee of MPs are debating, sets about the repeal of Section 59.

It's a move several European and South American countries have already made and would bring us into line with the United Nation's convention on the rights of the child. Proponents say it will send a message that violence against children is wrong and that parents will no longer get away with abuse when juries get bamboozled by the definition of reasonable force.

But opponents, including a growing body of so-called family groups set up to protect Section 59, say parents have a fundamental right to smack and removing that will make criminals of good, loving parents. "I actually believe that's the stumbling block at the moment," says Wood. "I don't think that the opposition, in terms of people who want to smack kids, or don't want to be told how to raise kids, is the issue. The issue is fear of being prosecuted for occasionally smacking your child."

There are ways, she hopes, of protecting parents from vexatious or trivial complaints. Suggestions include including some sort of purpose statement to accompany a law change saying the intention is not to prosecute for minor slaps.

But whether that will really work hinges on what the police make of the bill. They are due to make a submission to MPs in the next few weeks.

Either way, when the committee looking at the bill reports back to Parliament in October, Wood is convinced some sort of change will be on the cards.

What she hopes not to see is an amendment defining what is "reasonable force" - such as banning the use of implements or making it illegal to leave a mark on a child.

"It totally defeats the purpose of what we're trying to achieve here, which is a change in the norm in society - we don't want a law that says [smacking] is OK. That's inconsistent with the message."

It wasn't until she had trained as a nurse and begun work as a social worker in the 1960s that her views on smacking started to consolidate.

She saw many abused children, but the image of one baby has stuck in her mind.

She was a beautiful, soft-haired little girl born to a young single mum who loved her desperately. Then the baby turned into a toddler and the mother's world changed. "She smacked indiscriminately," Wood says, "As if, despite lots of advice, it was all she knew to do. By 3 the baby had become an angry little girl who had lost her joy in life."

Earlier Wood had made the decision not to smack her own two children - now in their late 20s and early 30s.

There were a couple of slip-ups - smacks she can't really remember in any detail "other than how horrible I felt when I lose my temper".

So something clicked when, in 1990 the then Children's Commissioner Ian Hassall first suggested repealing Section 59. "Man, you should have seen the headlines," Wood remembers with a chuckle. She was an advocate in the commissioner's office at the time and grasped the issue, starting a group called Epoch (End the physical punishment of children) with a couple of other women. Her 16-year fight began.

Though her parents never hit her, Wood vividly remembers her first smack - at the hands of a Catholic nun. After the entire family fell sick with malaria, her family moved from their Solomon Islands mission to Australia where, at 8, young Beth was sent to school for the first time.

"I remember being hauled out in front of the class and being caned across the hand, quite often, and I had absolutely no idea what it was about. You're totally powerless in those situations. You can't escape and you have no voice. I was clearly not doing what was expected but I remember thinking I had no idea what was expected. I hadn't been to school before."

Eventually smacking was banned in schools and Wood believes families, as teachers have, will eventually find other ways to discipline their children.

Meanwhile, next month she will retire from her job as domestic child advocate for Unicef and leave the fight against Section 59 in other people's hands.

Typically, there's no drama about this decision. Sure, the fact there is a bill made her decision to retire "a bit harder".

But she is simply turning 65, and wants to go tramping in Iceland and spend time on other parts of her life. Does she think she will see the end of Section 59 in her lifetime? "I'd feel extremely surprised and very pleased if it did," she says. "Very pleased," she adds. "And amazed. It will be wonderful."