A ban on spanking

by Editor · August 14, 2013

A proposed law that would ban parents from administering corporal punishment to their children is inevitably controversial. If enacted, South Africa will join 24 other nations that outlaw spanking, including Sweden, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Greece, Bulgaria, Kenya, Tunisia, Venezuela and Costa Rica.

“Safeguarding children from parental abuse is a matter of human rights” (CNS photo/Thomas Mukoya, Reuters)?

Many South Africans, likely a majority, will argue that the administration of a spanking is a valid option in correcting a child�s conduct. The old mantra, based on Proverbs 13:24, �spare the rod, spoil the child�, retains a certain measure of currency in South African society. Consequently there is widespread concern that this approach to pedagogy might be criminalised.

There is also an objection that the state has no business telling parents how to raise children, that the proposed law is an intrusion into the private sphere by a �nanny-state�.

Some parents may feel powerless in confronting misbehaving children without resorting to corporal punishment, or at least the threat of it. They might refer to their own childhood experiences and the corrective effects on them in mother�s common threat of �wait till your father comes home�.

Without the threat of a spanking, they fear, children who know their rights will misbehave with impunity. Criminalising it might even give rise to certain forms of manipulation, especially in cases of domestic conflict.

These concerns have some merit, even at an age when great numbers of parents elect to raise their children without recourse to beating them.

To reasonable minds, the thought that parents might be charged with assault should they use a flat hand on their child�s bottom must be preposterous.

The proposed law should not be aimed at parents who administer the occasional mild spanking. Its primary intent must be to protect children from abusive parents or guardians who dispense beatings harshly and regularly.

Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini has said that the proposed law intends to protect such brutalised children.

Indeed, the rights of physically abused children�of whom there are many, especially in brutalised societies such as South Africa�must precede the parental right to corporal punishment. Parents who frequently beat their children, especially in ways that cause physical injury, must be deterred from doing so by the law, or be held legally accountable for their actions.

However, the law will need to be defined in such a way that the mother who in a moment of stress hits her toddler�s backside does not risk legal repercussions. The law will have to be explicit in defining which acts of parental violence are to be criminalised, and which are exempt from prosecution.

Safeguarding children from parental abuse is a matter of human rights. It also serves society if it helps to break the cycles of brutalisation which form the continual patterns of aggression and violence in South Africa.

Violence breeds violence. While it does not follow that children who were beaten will invariably grow up to be violent themselves, it is evident that children who are not subjected to regular parental beatings grow up more likely to seek non-violent means of resolving disputes than those who are.

And it isn�t only parental violence that calls for our concern. The proposed law would by force exclude non-violent forms of parental cruelty and humiliation, some of which have devastating effects on children, but which are impossible to prove.

Legislation governing private conduct is notoriously difficult to enforce. To illustrate: spousal abuse is illegal in South Africa, yet wives are still being assaulted by their husbands in great numbers.

This is not a good reason to fail to enact such legislation, of course. Ideally, the proposed law should serve not only as a deterrent to cruel parents but, more so, as a framework for effecting a modification of behaviour in society�and, of course, as a means to take legal action when circumstances require.

A necessary component of the proposed law would be the facilitation of public education which is needed to advocate for alternative means of dispensing corrective discipline: verbal persuasion, non-violent forms of correction (such as withdrawal of privileges) and positive reinforcement.

The churches can play an important role in this.