“As part of their daily lives, children across Europe and the world continue to be spanked, slapped, hit, smacked, shaken, kicked, pinched, punched, caned, flogged, belted, beaten and battered in the name of discipline, mainly by adults whom they depend on. But in some places, it happens less than before, and there is a chance to stop it altogether.”
That is how the Council of Europe, a 47-country body that is supposed to promote civil liberties from Dublin to Vladivostok, explains its campaign to abolish physical punishment — launched in Crotia in mid-June with a flurry of debates, puppet shows, television spots, pamphlets in many languages and stirring calls to “raise your hand against smacking”.
Only 23 countries (18 of them European) have banned corporal punishment completely. But there are 106 — including many places where it was common only a generation ago — which have put a stop to corporal punishment in schools.
Countries where teachers still use force include the United States, where a Supreme Court ruling in 1977 (concerning two pupils whose beatings with a wooden paddle caused medical harm) found that a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” applied only to judicial proceedings. That left individual states to decide; in 22 of them, corporal correction in schools occurs in at least some districts.
In Europe, by contrast, smacking has nearly vanished from schools (even in Britain and Ireland, where it was rife) and the movement to stop parents and other adults hitting children is gaining ground. In 1979 Sweden became the first country to outlaw all violence by adults on children. It was controversial at the time, but after a two-year drive to publicise the law and the thinking behind it, which included putting advice on milk cartons, smacking itself, and belief in its value, declined fast.
In recent years, several European countries (Greece and Portugal, for example) have quietly abolished parental smacking after a Swiss-based lobby group challenged them for being in breach of the European social charter, a Council of Europe treaty. Three Latin American states (Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela) joined the non-smackers last year. Although nobody expects corporal punishment to vanish soon from traditional homes in Africa or the Middle East, the United States could soon stand out in the Americas, and among rich countries as a refuge for the spanker.
Indeed, it is the only country along with Somalia, which has failed to ratify a United Nations convention on children’s rights, which since 1990 has protected children from “all forms of physical or mental violence”. American officials helped draft the document, but it faces stiff opposition in some quarters of the United States.
Some Americans regret this. In a paper last year, Elizabeth Gershoff and Susam Bitensky of Michigan State University, say their country should bow to the combined pressure of a growing world consensus against smacking and scholarly evidence that it is useless or harmful. Summarising scores of studies, they conclude that smacking fails in one of its aims: to make a child see that some things are wrong, and change its long-term behaviour.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)