A profoundly dangerous cocktail of authoritarian interference
SPEAKING at the Scottish parliament’s equalities committee a few months ago in opposition to the Bill banning smacking, I made the point the other people in the room, in fact the political and professional classes supporting the Bill, are from ‘another planet’.
It was a throwaway line reflecting my profound frustration, but it is also true and a useful starting point for understanding why apparently intelligent ‘liberal’ people can be so unworldly and authoritarian.
John Finnie, the proposer of the Bill is a case in point: an ex-police officer who smacked his own children has, it appears, since becoming an MSP, seen the light. He has reformed his ways, come to understand what he did as a loving parent is no longer acceptable and has decided to criminalise any parent that thinks otherwise. Of note, his daughter, Ruth Maguire, was chairing the committee.
In the Holyrood bubble, Finnie will be surrounded by enlightened human rights and children’s rights experts, organisations and other right-thinking politicians and professionals, all of whom have a very particular and peculiar understanding of children and families. They use a strange form of therapeutic legalese, the type of language that is bamboozling for ordinary people, the vast majority of whom oppose this legislation. I met some of these rightthinking people at the committee.
A human rights lawyer, during his submission to the equalities committee, talked about the need to treat children with ‘equality before the law’.
He went on to suggest that my approach was the equivalent of attitudes of the 19th century, when we treated children as property or how we treated women or slaves. A professor in child wellbeing and protection was aghast at my suggestion that children don’t have rights, like adults, going on to explain that we cannot think of children ‘as a different order of human being from adults’. Talk as they may about children’s rights, the fact remains that children are very, very different from adults. They do not have the rights that adults have, thankfully, nor do we treat them with equality, either before the law or in many other ways.
If we were to take these professionals seriously, we would be inclined to ask: can we ground children who misbehave? Can we send them to their room? Can we confiscate their mobile phones? Can we tell them when to go to bed or demand they go to the toilet? These forms of discipline, if inflicted upon an adult would be seen as profoundly
troubling and indeed criminal. When done to children, they are, of course, nothing of the sort. Indeed, if we were to stop any form of discipline or punishment of children, we would rightly be seen as neglectful.
CHILDREN do not have rights in any meaningful sense. They are treated profoundly differently from adults and have been since early modern times as we became a civilised and mature society.
Children do not have rights – they have protections and the more we talk about children’s rights, the more, in reality, we are talking about giving more powers to the state. In particular, the children’s rights discussion takes away the authority of parents and gives it to professionals. One of the reasons this Bill is being introduced is because of the less trusting attitude the professional classes have towards parents.
The idea of ‘toxic families’ has grown exponentially over the past few decades, as have the concepts ‘at risk’ and the talk of ‘abuse’. Today we find ourselves in a climate where what goes on ‘behind closed doors’, within families, is treated with a heightened sense of suspicion.
Additionally, the professional classes talk endlessly about the ‘support’, they believe, parents need to raise their children.
The idea that families should have autonomy and independence, that they can raise their children themselves, as they see fit, is no longer part of the mindset of many professionals. Parents and parenting has been professionalised and turned into a problem to such an extent that there is a relentless drive to monitor children and regulate parents.
Finally, the last trend of note among these people is the exaggerated sense of childhood vulnerability. Today, almost any difficulty or hardship faced by a child is seen as not just problematic but potentially devastating, something that will ‘scar them for life’. When coupled with the distrust of parents and the concern about their competence, what we have is a profoundly dangerous cocktail of authoritarian interventionism – an approach that celebrates criminalising parents for a light smack as enlightened and liberating. In other words, we have an outlook of people who are living on another planet.
Dr Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University.