Tapu Misa: Smacking law change can lead to attitude change

The first time I tackled the subject of smacking in this column, it started out as a defence of a parent's inalienable right to smack.

After all, I'd been smacked in my younger days by my Christian and otherwise non-violent parents, and had emerged without any deep physical or psychological wounds.

As a parent, I too had administered the very odd bit of physical correction without attracting any attention from Child, Youth and Family.

But in the midst of what had seemed to me unassailable arguments about the need to save one's children from themselves, the need for strong parental control to prevent children reverting to their naturally unpleasant ways, and the fact that smacking did not equal child abuse, I had a change of heart.

It became increasingly clear to me that I was defending the indefensible.

Could there really be anything right about accepting a lesser standard of protection in law for children than we would for adults and animals?

Imagine a man trying to mount a defence of reasonable force for lovingly smacking his partner.

Well, maybe once upon a time, in the good old days when a man's home was his castle and the reasonable chastisement of one's chattels - children, wives, servants, slaves and apprentices - was permissible under the law.

Now it just seems illogical, and never more so than when I consider the campaign to change attitudes to child-rearing among Pacific Island parents.

This weekend in my old hometown, Porirua, Wellington, families will march down the street I once lived in to promote the reduction of violence in Pacific Island families.

Which is a good thing, of course. But how do you explain the inconsistencies of the New Zealand attitude to new arrivals from the Pacific - who, the promotional literature tells me, are more likely to have higher levels of tolerance to violence?

How to explain that violence is a no-no here - so lay not a finger on your wife or any other adult - but beat your child with a bamboo stick, a belt, a hose pipe, a piece of wood, or put them in metal chains to prevent them leaving the house, and we'll call that reasonable force within the law, as some juries have done under Section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961?

I used to think that the attitudes of some Pacific families were about 20 years behind the times, but given the resistance of so many to Green MP Sue Bradford's bill to repeal Section 59, now at select committee stage and open to public submissions, it's clear that new arrivals from the Pacific aren't the only ones behind the times.

In fact, if anything, many of us (and Maori too) may be ahead of Pakeha in our willingness to put an end to legal sanctions for the physical punishment of children, according to one study.

Remember that around 80 per cent of New Zealanders think that physical punishment of children is okay in some circumstances.

Remember, too, that a 2003 Unicef report ranked New Zealand third-highest for child abuse deaths.

It would be silly to claim that the repeal of Section 59 will stop child abuse, at least the kind that's been making the headlines recently: the Whakatane toddler who was subjected to severe abuse at the hands of his mother's boarders, and the Nelson baby whose parents broke his ribs and arms.

The perpetrators of those crimes are what leading Canadian researcher, psychologist Dr Joan Durrant, has described as "outliers", the small proportion of people at the extremities of society who are impervious to education and other appeals.

But a law change might be the start of an attitude change. It might just prevent the other abuses of children that go undetected, yet still carry harmful consequences.

As Sue Bradford says, it isn't just the law, it's the psychology. The argument that the law shapes people's ideas about the boundaries and limitations of physical punishment is borne out by the Swedish example.

In 1979, Sweden became the first country to ban any kind of physical abuse of children. The ban didn't happen in a vacuum, and the reforms didn't happen overnight.

Change began in 1928, with the abolition of corporal punishment in schools (New Zealand followed suit in 1990), and accompanied a programme of educating parents and putting in place state-funded initiatives to help families.

Since then, attitudes have undergone a radical shift. In 1965, 53 per cent of Swedes supported corporal punishment, but only 11 per cent do so now.

A 1994 survey of students, aged 13 to 15, found that only 3 per cent reported harsh slaps from their parents, and only 1 per cent said they'd been hit with an implement.

Not a single child died as a result of physical abuse in Sweden during the 1980s. Four died between 1990 and 1996, but only one at the hands of a parent.

Although reports of assaults against children have increased since 1981, which some detractors have pounced on as proof that the reforms didn't work, Dr Durrant, who spent 15 years studying the reforms, has pointed out that the majority are for petty offences, the reporting of which was encouraged by the reforms.

The proportion of suspects prosecuted who are in their 20s, and therefore raised during the no-smacking culture, has decreased.

But there's been no increase in parents being dragged off to the courts for minor infractions, and no increase in youth violence owing to a want of spanking in their upbringing.

Twelve more countries have followed Sweden's lead, with Finland, in 1983, being the only country in which a majority of the populace actually favoured abolition before the law change.

Israel found its way there through the State of Israel v Plonit case in 2000, in which the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a single mother of two children, aged 5 and 7, who hit her children on a daily basis, using her slippers and occasionally household objects.

Will we get there? Inevitably. Eventually.