For the past few days Chris Masoe’s assault of a fellow after-matcher reveller and Tana Umaga’s violent use of a handbag has been the talk of the town. But the incident has a wider relevance and is helpful to understanding Sue Bradford’s so-called ‘anti-smacking bill’?
There is no dispute that Masoe hit someone, and Umaga hit Masoe. Yet neither of them has been ‘criminalised’ because neither has been prosecuted. Sensibly, most would agree, the Police decided that no public good would be served by prosecution. And that surely is the point not being accepted by those who continue to raise ‘criminalisation of parents’ who ‘smack’ their children. Just as the Police exercised discretion in favour of Masoe and Umaga, it is expected they will continue to exercise the discretion with regard to parents who ‘smack’ if section 59 is repealed.
Indeed, a Cabinet Paper released recently under the Official Information Act makes it quite clear that there already exist significant safeguards to prevent post-repeal prosecutions for so-called “trivial offences” and that prosecutions such offences “are unlikely”.
At Christchurch last Saturday night, the fog made it difficult for spectators to work out what was going on. Similarly, a thick cloud is enveloping Bradford’s ‘Crimes Amendment (Abolition of Force as a Justification for Child Discipline) Bill’ which seeks to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act, the law that currently gives parents prosecuted for assaulting their children the defence of ‘reasonable force’.
In effect, repeal will give children the same legal protections from assault that adults have. And as with adults, the decision to prosecute for assault will continue to be determined by the action in context, rather than the age of the victim, or the relationship between victim and assailant.
There are many reasons why section 59 should be repealed. It contravenes Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, and the UN monitoring committee has noted this breech of New Zealand’s obligations as a signatory. A number of New Zealand’s most reputable child and family organisations put this and other compelling reasons before the Select Committee last week. Barnardos, Save the Children, The Families Commission, and the Office for the Commissioner for Children all support repeal. They know that hitting children hurts children; that hitting children is the least effective way to improve children’s behaviour; and that hitting children normalises violence within families. They know these things because of the weight of local and international research evidence, much of it reported by these organisations in their written and oral submissions.
But no matter how convincing this evidence, Bradford’s bill continues to be called the ‘anti-smacking bill’ and opponents of reform continue to build hysteria around the so-called ‘criminalisation problem’. Both terms, like the fog last Saturday, make it hard to see what is really going on. ‘Smacking’ and ‘criminalisation’ are both emotive terms. The language of smacking minimises what happens to a child when a parent hits them, and normalises hitting as a rational parenting strategy. The language of criminalisation frightens parents, and forces parents who hit their kids to claim it is legitimate and necessary for their effective parenting.
New Zealand kids are hit, and many are hit hard. Recent research published in the New Zealand Medical Journal found that 80 percent of the participants in the Dunedin multi-disciplinary study were physically punished during their childhoods. This included what the researchers described as ‘smacking’, but nearly 45 percent reported being hit with an object, and six percent reported ‘extreme physical punishment’.
Research carried out for Save the Children found that when New Zealand parents hit, they are most likely to be tired, angry, or ‘out of control’. Combined, these studies show us there is nothing OK about the way we hit our kids in this country. Our talk about ‘smacking’ means we don’t see the ‘hitting’.
In Sweden and Germany, parents who ‘smack’ are no longer protected by law. In both countries, there have been no significant increases in prosecutions, but significant changes in the attitudes and behaviour of parents following legislative change. In New Zealand, we need to find sensible ways to illuminate what is going on when we hit our kids, and to throw light on so-called the ‘criminalisation problem’. At the same time, just like the Rugby Union has made it clear to Masoe and Umaga, we need to make it clear to all parents that hitting our children is not OK.
