My Lords, what a very interesting debate this has been; I did not expect this. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for tabling the amendment. I also commend the work of my noble friend Lady Walmsley, who first raised this issue 20 years ago. The statistics I have show that 20 years ago some 80% of the public thought hitting a child should be illegal. What has happened in the intervening years to warrant parents’ outrage—as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey—at the prospect of not being able to smack their children, I am not entirely sure. As I have been involved in this subject before, I was surprised to learn that the corporal punishment of children is not illegal already. It contravenes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, reminded us.
Turning to the reasoning for amending this Bill now, we know that violence begets violence, as described so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. As she said, there is a pandemic of violence in this country and the vast brunt of domestic abuse falls on women, having been perpetrated by men. It has been a distressing experience for me to have to go through all the ways and circumstances in which this happens, but those who perpetrate violence always pick a victim weaker than they are. Some men do it to women, but some men and women do it to children.
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The noble Lord, Lord Curry, gave us a case study of a child who had been taken away from their parents because of an unexplained bruise, implying that safeguarding should not be properly investigating things such as bruising of children. In my view, better safe than battered.
I do not need to rehearse the arguments about how a culture of violence is passed from generation to generation or how we will never stop this happening until it is nipped in the bud. A child who has not had violence perpetrated on them is far less likely to become a perpetrator themselves.
My noble friend Lady Walmsley makes the important point that in this country we do not afford our children the same protections as their parents. The Bill includes children within the definition of a victim. How can it be illegal to hit the mother or the father but legal to hit the child? Under the law as it stands, it is not illegal to hit a child unless you raise a bruise. That is all right then—you can commit any of the other actions of domestic abuse described under Clause 1(3) and hit a child hard, but not so hard that others can witness the outcome of what you have done.
The only way to stop this pandemic of abuse is to stop transmission from one generation to the next and train perpetrators to handle differently situations where violence is likely to occur.
Many other excellent points have been made by other noble Lords. There is no need for me to detain the House by repeating them. They are doing it in Scotland; they are doing it in Wales; why can we not do it in England? The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, says that if we did so, we would open the floodgates to trivial complaints. This has been refuted in this debate; the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, summed this up by saying that norms change. I hope the noble Baronesses, Lady Fox and Lady Hoey, are swimming against the tide. I and my party strongly support this amendment.