My Lords, I rise to speak against Amendment 82. I appreciate that the noble Baronesses who have tabled this amendment mean well, although their language is quite interesting because they have used the most extreme language. They talked about violence, battering and physical attacks. I do not see any need for a criminal ban on—I know the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, did not want to use this word but I will say—smacking, or an end to the reasonable chastisement law.
It is important we remember that all the law currently allows for is a parent to, if they wish, use a very mild smack on the bottom or a tap on the back of the hand or leg. There is no evidence that this very moderate and limited defence has been misused to allow parents to get away with abusing their children. The idea that it leads to escalation—a parent using a very mild smack today will beat their child black and blue tomorrow—is such an insult to millions of normal, decent parents who would never dream of doing any such thing. You might as well say that shouting at your child should be banned, because that too can sometimes escalate.
It is a ridiculous and offensive notion and frankly, for me, some of the alternatives that this “good parenting” brings in which families could use to chastise seem much worse. If I was a child, my choice would be to have the quick smack and be outside playing again rather than being locked up in my room for three or four hours on my own with nothing or nobody to speak to. We have no idea what the psychological effects of that are on young children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talked about public support. We do not have that public support. We know there are no popular calls for a ban. It may be an issue which obsesses certain activists and people, but the idea that the public are clamouring for us to criminalise parents who smack is far from the truth. Polling in Scotland and Wales ahead of the smacking bans there demonstrates how unwanted and unwelcome these new regimes are: 76% of Welsh adults said no to changing the law in 2017 and 74% of Scottish adults opposed a smacking ban. I have not seen much discussion of it in Northern Ireland. Let us not pretend the Great British public have given a mandate to change the law. In my view and in most parents’ views, smacking is a reasonable option that responsible parents must be free to use if they see fit.
Journalists, campaigners and some of the noble Lords who have spoken are prone to claiming that “this study says this” or “that research says that” or “that psychologist says this” and it deserves to be criminalised. But if you actually look at the data, you usually find either that the researchers are active campaigners dressing their views up as science or that the research did not make the claims attributed to it. I
am not aware of any reliable studies showing causation between gentle physical chastisement of the kind we are talking about and negative child outcomes. By removing the reasonable chastisement protection, tapping your child on the hand or the bottom would become a crime—an assault, as some of the noble Baronesses call it.
If this happens, the police and others would have a duty to report and investigate every case that came to their attention. Every instance of a loving mum or dad using a little smack in a reasonable and normal manner, perhaps when the child was in imminent danger, would suddenly be liable for prosecution. That cannot be anything but detrimental to that family’s trust in the authorities. Removing the safeguard would likely result in significant overreporting to social services. The twitching curtain brigade would love it.
There are probably thousands of parents using reasonable chastisement every day, and the idea that they would all stop overnight because we tell them to is, I am afraid, pretty naive. Even if only a fraction of those parents came to the attention of the authorities, it would place considerable pressure on the already overburdened social services and police, and this would dilute the resources available to help truly vulnerable children and their families. Some of them would eventually slip through the cracks and be overlooked. I believe that this would be the legacy of passing this amendment.
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In all honesty, I fail to see how removing the reasonable chastisement defence helps families at all. It would increase the pressure on reasonable parents and dissolve their trust, and it would increase the pressure on our vital services and those most at risk. Finally, it would hinder the cohesion of some of the United Kingdom’s communities. Our nation has a wide diversity of communities; however, marginalised communities may be especially caught by the ban, because it would be likely to affect some more than others. If social services, the police and others are seen as interfering, that would only increase distrust and division.
I look around your Lordships’ House tonight—well, I do not see too many people, but I can see them on Zoom—and I wonder how many of its Members could honestly say that they were never smacked as a child.
Very seriously, I believe that this amendment would genuinely risk real child abuse being seen differently. If the public think and are told that smacking in the way that I have described is child abuse, I believe that the bar is lowered so much that the way other really serious child abuse is seen could be seriously damaged.
Families are the backbone of our society and they deserve all the support we can give them. The reasonable chastisement defence is, by definition, a reasonable law. I know that this amendment is not being put to the vote tonight. I actually wish it was; I am pretty convinced that noble Lords would vote against it, because the public know that this is not the right way to go, and it certainly should not be attached to a Domestic Abuse Bill.