Smacking rise during lockdown ‘disturbing’
Physical violence against children is soaring in ‘terrible backwards step’, warns NSPCC chief
BRITAIN has taken a “terrible backwards step” in its treatment of children as cases of smacking and physical abuse soar in lockdown, the NSPCC chief executive has warned.
Sir Peter Wanless told The Sunday
Telegraph that the rise of physical violence against children during the pandemic has left him feeling “disturbed”.
He warns families being locked up at home, which has seen children being educated by parents, has had a “pressure cooker” effect.
Sir Peter said: “One of the things that has really disturbed me is that I think, as a nation, we were increasingly intolerant of the physical abuse of children, and there have been times in the past when the NSPCC has really had to shout strongly about children being hit and knocked around, that sort of thing.
“And increasingly, the focus has been on emotional abuse and sexual abuse and people have gradually become more attuned to those types of abuse as well, and able to sort of spot them and say that’s not OK.
“One of the most shocking things for me during this period has been that we have had young people coming to us who have experienced physical violence at the hands of family members around them and that feels like such a terrible backwards step, and, I assume, can only be a consequence of this pressure cooker environment and intensive situation which people find themselves shut away in with no chance of escape.
“So there are more tragic examples, and more vivid individual examples [of individual children’s stories] but I think that physical violence coming back [has affected me the most].”
Sir Peter’s comments come after the Government published data in January regarding the rise in notifiable incidents that involve death or serious harm to a child where abuse or neglect is known or suspected.
The data revealed 285 serious incident notifications during the first half of 2020-21 – an increase of 27 per cent on the same period in 2019-20. Of these, 38.5 per cent related to children under the age of one. There were 119 serious incident notifications relating to child deaths, marking an increase from 89 in the same period of 2019/20.
Sir Peter said the death and serious harm figures “rose in the second half of last year, and it’s always the case that the under-ones experience the worst violence, and that’s the case again”.
He also warned that some adults may dismiss such actions with an attitude of “my child was about to put his hand in a pan of boiling water and so I hit him to get him out of the way of that”.
Asked where the line is between discipline and criminal offence, Sir Peter said: “If I push you slightly in the street, or if I bump into you accidentally, that’s not an assault.
“Lots of people will say, ‘I got clipped round the ear when I was a kid, it didn’t do me any harm.’ It’s really important not to kind of trivialise the discussion [and claim that] NSPCC are somehow saying: discipline is wrong [which we are not]. We’re saying that children deserve the same protection as adults and especially little children who are incredibly fragile, and as you see from the figures you don’t need to overreact by very much in terms of shaking a little baby or, you know, hitting overhard, and it can be fatal.”
In January 2020, the Welsh Assembly voted to ratify the so-called “smacking ban”. This means that from 2022, parents will be banned by law from smacking their children. In 2019 Scotland became the first country in the UK to make it a criminal offence for parents to smack their children.
Sir Peter is calling for ministers in England to follow their example.
“Children deserve the same protection as adults under the law, we’re already behind other countries around the world,” he said, adding: “I think it’s unlikely that many adults would say, ‘We British reserve the right to criminally assault our child.’”