Spanking ban makes no sense
Ben (not his real name) was f our. When he pushed his two- yearold sister to the ground and left her crying, his mother asked him to apologize. When he defiantly laughed at his mother, he got two swats on the bottom and then managed the aforementioned apology. Is this a normal family experiencing an unpleasant moment in parenting? Should Ben’s mother have done something differently? Does anyone think this action was criminal?
Some do, including Sen. Murray Sinclair, f ormer chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who is pushing Bill S-206 in the Senate.
The bill would repeal section 43 of the Criminal Code, which allows parents and teachers to use reasonable force with children, protecting those groups from criminal sanction. Repealing section 43 would remove that protection. All the other questions — to which parents of goodwill will answer differently — remain unanswered.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommends that section 43 be repealed.
Why remains something of a mystery — the case of using reasonable force at home with your own children in 2017 has no connection with abuse of First Nations children in residential schools at the turn of the century.
In fact, the starting point for the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in residential schools was the children’s removal from the parental home.
There is legitimate concern that the separation of good parents from their children could be one outcome of repealing section 43.
In New Zealand, where spanking was banned in 2007, there are documented cases of traumatizing court cases, all because a parent admitted to spanking a child.
Indeed, Canadian l awyers agree. Back in 2008, Mark Lapowich of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers argued before a Senate committee that “a valid defence being removed” f rom “parents and teachers who are doing their best to raise and educate t heir children… through the appropriate use of discipline.”
Neither do we have evidence that parents are abusing section 43 now. Perhaps parents aren’t using reasonable force at all. A 2015 Pew Research poll ( American data) found that “spanking is the least commonly used method of discipline — just 4 per cent of parents say they do it often.”
All this discussion would be moot i f the appropriate use of reasonable force caused children to have aggressive or other negative tendencies, as claimed by a 2016 University of Texas at Austin s t udy. Robert Larzelere, Endowed Professor of Parenting, Oklahoma State University, suggests two methodological flaws with that particular study.
First, it fails to distinguish between spanking and abuse. “Of t heir 75 studies, only four explicitly limited spanking to their stated focus of ‘ hitting a child on their buttocks . . . using an open hand,’” writes Larzelere for the American College of Pediatricians. He goes on: “Those were the four studies that found spanking to be as effective or more effective than the three alternatives investigated for enforcing cooperation with time out in defiant 2- to 6-year-olds.”
The second flaw is the failure to distinguish between cause and correlation.
Larzelere highlights that if we don’t ask what came first, the spanking or the aggressive behaviour in children, then we are at risk of assigning blame to something that reasonable force did not cause.
He points out this “could be interpreted to show that an effective chemotherapy regimen caused a group of patients to develop cancer if the researcher did not distinguish whether the cancer occurred before, during, or after the chemotherapy.”
Senator David Plett, who opposes S- 206, says “Repealing section 43 of the Criminal Code goes beyond taking away a reasonable, responsible parent’s ability to spank; it takes away their ability to parent.”
Ben’s mother may have chosen a different form of discipline, but this should be the subject of open parenting forums and educational efforts, not a court case where her status as a mother is at risk.
The safest course of action for Canada’s families is to keep section 43.
FEW PALESTINIANS IDENTIFY CHIEFLY WITH A NATIONAL IDENTITY. — SOLOMON REPEALING SECTION 43 OF THE CRIMINAL CODE ... TAKES AWAY (A PARENT’S) ABILITY TO PARENT.