My Lords, I am sorry; I had not realised I had been called and did not hear the Deputy Speaker.
I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for seeing the opportunity to bring this really important issue before your Lordships again. As she said, now is a very good time to return to a subject I first raised in your Lordships’ House 20 years ago, soon after I was introduced as a Peer. The time was right then, and it was also right when a group of us tried unsuccessfully to completely remove the reasonable punishment defence during the passage of the Children Act 2004. It is even more right now, as violence against children has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Any time is a good time to stop violence against children.
The fact is that if this country cannot give its children equal protection under the laws of assault, such as their parents enjoy, it cannot say that it values its children and protects their rights. The committee on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child agrees and has been very critical of the UK. Public opinion also agrees: 20 years ago, 80% of the public thought it should be illegal for anyone to hit a child. Indeed, many thought it already was. I suspect it is even higher now. Most people think violence against a child is a particularly egregious act, especially when it happens in a child’s own home, from which she cannot escape, and is done by someone she should be able to trust to protect her.
Of course parents have a right to bring up their children to behave well, but there are many more effective ways of demonstrating right and wrong. In the 58 countries where the law bans parental violence against children, parents have been helped to learn better ways of carrying out their duty to discipline their child. It is often called “positive parenting”. Violence against a child is definitely negative parenting, and most young parents today agree and would not dream of hitting their child.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has said, children learn by example. Parents who beat their child cannot be surprised if the child copies that behaviour and hits other children in the playground and, because violence begets violence, they may also grow up to beat their own children. Violence is also detrimental to the development of the child and should be regarded as an adverse childhood event—an ACE—deserving of intervention.
Recent research supports a ban on hitting children. A large long-term longitudinal study by Ma, Lee and Grogan-Kaylor, published in the Journal of Pediatrics
in February, of a range of adverse child experiences with particular focus on violence against children, reached the following conclusion:
“ACEs and spanking have similar associations in predicting child externalizing behavior. Results support calls to consider physical punishment as a form of ACE. Our findings also underscore the importance of assessing exposure to ACEs and physical punishment among young children and providing appropriate intervention to children at risk.”
In other words, they found that hitting children does not stop them misbehaving; indeed it can make it worse and has an adverse effect on their development, so services with a duty to protect the child should intervene to stop it. That starts with the law of the land. In the UK, we have already acknowledged that a child who watches violence against its mother in the home is at risk of mental and emotional trauma. How much more trauma will a child suffer who is treated to the same violence himself or herself?
We all want to help parents with the hardest of tasks—bringing up a child healthy and happy—but the current law does not do that. It is discriminatory to children and unhelpful to parents. Hitting a child hard enough to cause a bruise is illegal, but some children do not bruise easily, so could be hit harder without the parents breaking the law. How does a parent know how hard they can hit a child before overstepping that limit? Of course, the answer is not to do it at all and find a better way that does not damage the child you love. The law is nonsense and must be changed.
People have realised this in other countries, including the other three in our own union. Scotland has banned and Wales is about to ban violence against children, and Northern Ireland is looking at it. It is instructive to look at how other countries did it; there is a common approach. When I was in New Zealand, I heard directly from the Minister there about how a lot of help was put in place for parents to learn better ways of disciplining children before removing the very damaging option that we are discussing today. Help with positive parenting and someone to turn to for advice—we need to do that too. It is not that difficult or expensive, but the benefits are enormous for families.
I have a final point. Sweden was the first country to ban parents from hitting children, over 40 years ago, yet Swedish prisons are not and were not full of caring parents who occasionally lost their temper and gave their child a trivial smack. By the way, most parents who do that regret it very much afterwards. Those who fear criminalising otherwise caring parents should remember that the CPS will charge someone with a criminal offence only if the situation meets two tests: first, there is a good chance of obtaining a conviction and, secondly, it is in the public interest. The situation I have just described would not fulfil those tests. However, the law on assault should be clear, helpful to parents and fair to children.
The Government need to show leadership here. When Sweden banned hitting children in 1979, there was not a majority of public opinion in favour of the change, as there is here, but its Government went ahead and did the right thing anyway. Now, Sweden could not get away with legalising hitting children as, I am pleased to say, strong public opinion would prevent
such a move. I beg the Government to show similar leadership and accept this amendment, or do I have to spend another 20 years campaigning for it?