A smacking ban? It may come back and slap us in the face...
IAM sure that being smacked (very seldom, as it happened) did me some harm, though I am equally sure there are some people who t hink I should have been smacked more than I was. But the question is whether banning smacking will do more harm than allowing it. And that is much more complicated. No sane person actively wants to smack a child. But a lot of sane, kind people have sometimes thought it wise to do so.
They have often regretted it afterwards, but more because of the effect it had on them than for the effect it had on the child.
I’m not talking here about the angry and obviously damaging violence you sometimes see in supermarkets, where an exasperated and furious parent, having long ago lost control of a child, lashes out in futile, disorderly rage.
I am certainly not talking about the use of a closed fist.
But children need limits and often crave them. They do not know where or when to stop. They often cannot tell the difference between mild risk and grave danger. They are sometimes very selfish and wilful, and will come to harm if they do not learn to control these things.
And when we ban smacking completely – as Scotland is about to do and as the rest of the country is bound to not long afterwards – we will pay a price for this.
We will raise a generation which knows few limits, does not know how to behave and can sometimes only be restrained by the superior force of the State, or by being dosed with powerful and dangerous drugs. In my view, we are already paying that price.
It is part of the colossal battle that has been raging for decades between the family and the State. The State is winning. Parents once had great power. Now they have almost none. Fathers, once kings (or despots) in t heir own homes, have been declared officially unnecessary.
Stable, lifelong marriage vanishes from among us, scorned by our culture and the law. Step-parents, never quite the same as natural parents however hard they try, are more common than ever.
In such a world, even a well-intentioned light smack is half an inch away from accusations of abuse, the call to Childline, and the official dissolution of the family involved by police and social workers. The ‘rescued’ child is then often plunged into a dismal chaos of neglect in authority-free ‘care’.
These cases aren’t anything like those of Baby Peter or Maria Colwell. But such horror stories have been used to grant greater and greater powers to the authorities to intervene. Most of us think we approve of this change in the bal- ance of forces. But are you sure? Since families stopped disciplining children, the State seems to me to have grown hugely in its willingness to threaten violence.
In the days of smacking, police walked around alone in tunics with no visible weapons. Now they make their rare public appearances in pairs or squads, clad in stab vests, clubs, pepper sprays and handcuffs.
WHERE parents are weak, all adults are weak. In the schools attended by the poor, and especially by those children who have very little family life and whose fathers are often absent, there is terrible disorder. This is largely kept secret because nobody knows what to do about it. But it is occasionally revealed.
A little-noticed report earlier this month disclosed the huge level of school exclusions concealed by official figures. Everyone over 50 knows how much less safe and orderly our streets are now than they were.
I think these things are connected. I also think it is impossible, in the country we have become, to make a case for smacking. So I will not try to do so. But I will say there are times when civilisations have to choose between two unwelcome courses. And we may come, in time, to regret having been quite so smug about how good and kind we thought we were in this era.
I DO not think the Government begin to realise just how bad the new Universal Credit benefits system is. Case after case suggests that good, honest people down on their luck are being forced into debt and made to rely on food banks by its cruel delays.
Universal Debit would be a better name, and if the Tories really don’t want Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street, they should suspend its implementation now.