The website of the New Zealand campaign group “Protect Good Parents” promises to tell  “the truth about smacking”.  While you might think there’s not much to tell — is it okay or not to hit children? — it turns out you were wrong. 

Smacking is actually very complicated. The Protect Good Parents explanation is lengthy, with plenty of bullet points, qualifications and even a handy table to help you differentiate between “smacking” and “physical abuse”. The whole thing reminds me of the kind of “guidelines for sensible alcohol consumption” alcoholics like to construct in an effort to prove they can totally keep it under control. If something is completely unnecessary, and the potential consequences of overstepping the mark so devastating, is it really worth the faff of making all these rules? Are you so into drinking or defending “disciplinary smacking” that you’re willing to go to all this trouble and run all this risk? Alas, in both cases it seems plenty of people are. 

As the UK government considers a smacking ban for England, the pro-smacking lobby will be working hard to make their case. A common argument will be “I was smacked and it never did me any harm”. Indeed, this is heard so often that anti-smackers will almost automatically retort that clearly it did — it’s made you into an adult who defends smacking. I confess to having used that line myself, though if I’m honest, I’ve never been fully convinced by it. The trouble is, it’s begging the question. If a person doesn’t believe smacking is harmful, why would they consider holding this belief to be evidence of smacking’s harm?  

And maybe even those of us who would like to see smacking banned ought to believe those who claimed to be unharmed. Having heard it so many times, I am prepared to accept that there are people who were smacked as children who do not feel it has left lasting scars. They’re the people who’ll tell you they got a slap if they behaved badly — “but then I knew not to in future!” — and who knows, in their case that could have been exactly how it happened. What troubles me, though, are the follow-on conclusions they draw from this — either that people who were smacked and are not okay with it must have been too weak to learn all those valuable lessons from the school of hard knocks, or that if other parents went further than theirs did, well, that’s hardly the fault of smacking per se. In both cases, I think these people are wrong. 

I don’t think any form of smacking is okay. However, if your only experience of being smacked is in a context that made some form of sense — you did something that was objectively wrong, the punishment was consistent and showed no signs of escalating and you knew how to avoid it in future — then I’d say that is relatively fortunate (while still unacceptable). For most children, that simply isn’t the way things go. 

According to the law as it currently stands, smacking is permitted as “reasonable chastisement” if it is open-handed and does not leave a mark. But how often should it be permitted? For which offences? At what age does it become inappropriate? Does it depend on whether your child gets bigger than you? Does it matter if your child has specific, diagnosed behavioural difficulties? What if you decide your child is bad — very, very bad — to the extent that you feel your chastisement remains “reasonable” even if you go a little further than the law strictly allows? What if they’re now an adult but they still have lessons to learn? All families are different and there are some areas — physical assault being one — where generally agreed social judgements and standards are necessary in order to minimise risk. 

In many cases, there is no clear indication when “reasonably chastising” should end

The reason why organisations such as Protect Good Parents fall over themselves to try to differentiate between smacking “with love and concern” and physical abuse “with anger and malice” is because everyone knows most smacking is done in anger. It’s a loss of control on the part of the parent, and many parents do feel shame as a result. People respond to shame in different ways, though, one of which is to retell the story so that all the blame lies with the child. “Reasonable chastisement” done “with love and concern” offers the perfect cover. You were reasonable, they were not. Look what they made you do (out of love, of course). I don’t believe outlawing smacking would lead to countless prosecutions. I do think it would make some parents who perceive themselves as “good” think twice.

Clearly smacking doesn’t always escalate to more significant, persistent violence, but sometimes it does. In many cases, there is no clear indication when “reasonably chastising” should end, other than a child leaving home (while the law does not allow for the smacking of adults, parents for whom it has become normalised do not necessarily see a birthday as a cut-off point). It is easy to say “when I think of smacking, I’m not thinking of that”. It’s the no true smacking fallacy. The only acceptable physical assault is my physical assault, which isn’t assault at all. 

If you were smacked and say you weren’t harmed, I have no interest in encouraging you to feel traumatised. You would, however, have been no worse a child or an adult had you never been smacked at all. There are children for whom smacking has meant and led to something different, and far more harmful. This debate ought to be for them, not those for whom — despite their passionate defence of the practice — it apparently means nothing at all.