My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot support Amendment 82. I very strongly support the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hoey and Lady Fox. The defence of reasonable chastisement was created to stop parents being prosecuted for assault when they did not deserve to be prosecuted. If a parent hits a child in a way that causes any kind of mark—the CPS would say anything more than a transient reddening of the skin—then they have used unreasonable chastisement and can quite properly be prosecuted. The reasonable chastisement defence helps to ensure that good parents do not find themselves accused of being a child abuser for doing something perfectly gentle and humane. This defence therefore exists, first, to keep children safe and, secondly, to protect loving, decent parents. The current law does not need amending; it achieves the right balance. Who, after all, wants to criminalise reasonable behaviour?
Friends of ours had a child taken from their family by overenthusiastic social workers, quite wrongly, which caused enormous distress. It was because of an unexplainable bruise. I expect that most of us experienced reasonable chastisement when we were children. In 2017, a ComRes poll found that this was the experience of 85% of adults. If reasonable chastisement was so harmful that it deserved to be criminalised, you would expect eight out of 10 adults to manifest the same symptoms as children who have been abused. But of course they do not. How many of us whose parents loved us, cared for us and taught us right from wrong think our childhoods would have been better if our parents had been prosecuted merely for giving us a well-deserved smack on the bottom? That is what this amendment would mean for families today.
Parents know their own children. They are best placed to judge whether a tap on the hand of a toddler who has resisted all other blandishments is the right call. I would strongly challenge the assumption that every parent who smacks their child should be described as hitting and violent. None of us approves of such
actions. Parents have a huge range of tactics and strategies at their disposal to help their children grow up into kind, diligent adults: gentle instruction, words of praise, the naughty step and withdrawing privileges. But for many parents, reasonable chastisement sometimes fits the bill. Who are we to make criminals of those whose parenting philosophy differs from our own on this point?
For every person who claims that such common-sense parenting is damaging, we have thousands of sensible parents living in the real world who are convinced otherwise. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that three-quarters of the public do not want to expose parents who use reasonable chastisement to the full force of the criminal law. This amendment is neither necessary nor wanted by the public. We should not use the criminal law to enforce political fashions and condemn the mums and dads of today for making the same decisions that many of us have made. We must let parents decide for themselves. Common sense should not result in a criminal record, and that is not an alarmist statement.
Last year, as we have been told already, Scotland passed a law banning smacking, while telling critics again and again that removing the reasonable chastisement defence would not result in parents being criminalised. Yet less than a month before the ban came into effect, the Scottish Government published advice telling members of the public to dial 999 to report a crime in progress if they saw a parent smacking their child. We are only months into the implementation of that law in Scotland, so we must wait and see what happens once the authorities begin to enforce it in earnest. So far, there is a lack of evidence that criminalising parents has reduced domestic abuse in countries that have introduced so-called smacking bans.
Instead of attacking good parents we should be reassuring them of our support, especially after the challenging year that families have experienced. There would be a real danger in including this amendment in the Domestic Abuse Bill. Loving parents are not domestic abusers and it is insulting to suggest otherwise. A gentle tap on the hand to discourage a persistent two year-old from putting their finger in every plug socket they encounter is not child abuse but responsible parenting. Abusive parents are already caught by the law, but this amendment would task police and social services with targeting not abusive but loving parents. It would be a serious mistake.