Spare the rod and spoil the child - Mum

On display in a wooden cabinet meant for precious possessions is an unconventional showpiece. A small rubber riding crop rubs shoulders defiantly with children's bric-a-brac and family china.

To the social workers who heard it had been used to smack a child, it was a weapon. To the journalists who reported the incident, it was a horse whip. To the family who owns the crop, it's a joke.

Directions to this small Timaru home are delivered in an email with self-amused assurances: "We promise not to horsewhip you!" At the dinner table, any slight indiscretion by the youngest daughter Olivia, 12, is met with the likes of: "Watch it, that's worth another horsewhipping". The rod itself has a small tag attached: "Warning. Application of this weapon to buttocks may result in CYFS taking your child."

Which, almost two years ago, is exactly what happened. Jane, a motherly figure dressed tonight in leggings and a baggy jersey, hit her son, James, then 12, with the crop after, she says, he swung a softball bat at her partner's head. Earlier, she had also given him "six of the best" with a bamboo cane. When her son's teacher noticed a red mark on his leg during PE class, Jane was charged with assault. A jury acquitted her, saying the force used was reasonable, but it didn't end there: she lost a Family Court hearing to get her boy back and he is still in the care of Child, Youth and Family.

Jane has never disputed that she hit her child, but defends her right to have done so. Pro and anti-smacking brigades have latched onto the case as the select committee hearing on the repeal of the so-called "smacking law", section 59, approaches.

To some, Jane is a champion of parents' rights in a world gone politically correct-crazy. To others, she is the poster child for the anti-smacking brigade which has painted her as a child-abusing tyrant unfit to parent.

According to James, 14, who is now at boarding school, the discipline was deserved. "I was naughty," he told the Herald on Sunday. "I was swearing at my mum, I'd just get angry. I just got a smack with the riding crop. It hurt for like 10 seconds but then it went away."

He says he doesn't know why he has anger problems. Jane, who sees him at holidays, says his behavioural problems stopped when she disciplined him. James says the crop was not an isolated incident. "I used to get in trouble and I used to get whacked and I had red marks all the time." The marks never lasted more than an hour, he says.

There is no doubt that this is a family which has been scarred by violence.

A born-again Christian, Jane appears unerringly honest about her past wrongs. She's been convicted of conspiring to murder her ex-husband (but she says she didn't do it). She has been wronged by her mother, her sister, her sister's friend. She has little contact with her father. She has repetitive stress syndrome which means she can no longer work. Her current partner, she says, has done time for incest he committed as a child and is on a benefit after a serious workplace accident. Her second husband was jailed for attempted grievous bodily harm on her and her children.

And just last week, police laid new charges for assault against Jane after an incident earlier in the year. For legal reasons details of the new charges cannot be published, but she denies them.

"It's been an interesting life," says Jane of the litany of misfortune she tells without tears. It's only due to her "superhuman strength" and her faith in God that she has survived, she says. God has blessed them, she says. Despite all the bad, she can always see the good in things. A sign on the wall by the family computer commands: "Something good will happen today".

"If something bad happens, it's OK, because our father has got something better in store for us. You can't have the good without the bad."

The picture in this small, rural family home appears unerringly wholesome. As Olivia throws hay to the horses over deep snow with her grandfather, Jane comments: "That's Penny, Olivia's pony. I think it's better for a young lady to focus her attentions on her horse than a young man. It's birth control."

Soon they will go inside and while her mother warms through the home-made bread and cooks soup with organic vegetables, Olivia - the youngest of Jane's five children and the only one still at home - will show her grandfather the full DVD set of Little House on the Prairie. They won the entertainment system after Jane "passed comment" to God when the children were squabbling over the sole television. Prayer also delivered a fridge and a washing machine. Over the doorway between the lounge and kitchen is a dusty needlepoint work. It reads: "Praise, Softness, Gentleness, Self-control."

But it's not all apple-pie and home-grown goodness. God may have been good with appliances, but he's been bad with men. Jane was after a knight in shining armour. She thought she found him in her first husband, but from the first day they were married, he stopped opening car doors for her. "You hold out the hope that he will become the man he was, that he used to be. I thought he was the kindest, sweetest man. I didn't know he would have a rusty back. He was horrible. He had no armour at all."

She claims he beat her and taunted her. She had three children to him before, she says, he went on a rampage and she packed the kids up and drove to a new town - and almost straight into her second abusive marriage. This was James' father, a relationship that lasted less than two years.

Jane worries about her daughters, about whether her eldest Elizabeth will get caught up in bad relationships like she did. She wonders whether sons James and John's, 16, tendency to anger and violence is a result of growing up with so much of it. James, she adds quickly, is no longer violent, since she disciplined him. John, she says, has lived with his father for a year, and has acted up more since then.

She took a course through Women's Refuge to learn the signs of an abusive partner. She believes she was attracted to men who were like her mother: controlling, manipulative, fearsome - though never violent, she says. Well, no more than was usual in those days.

"I'm not going to get in that situation again. I know the signs now. I will not stand for anything that resembles violence of any kind."

To her, there is a vast difference between violent abuse and necessary physical discipline.

"Children are smacked because their parents love them enough to discipline them in the way that the Bible says is okay. It you do not physically discipline your child you will spoil them and not in a positive way."

She has some rules: never hit a baby, never use a closed fist, never hit in anger.

"It's not okay to hit a child. It's okay to discipline a child to correct behaviour but not as a vent for your anger. It has to be calm and reasonable for the circumstances."

Reports that she prayed before hitting James anger her: "I always pray for my children. It wasn't like I prayed and then whacked my boy."

Her Elizabeth, 19, a wide-smiled, straight-up, mile-a-minute girl who doesn't have a bar of the Bible and smokes roll-your-owns, was there at the time: she remembers little. Jane hit James two or three times, she thinks.

"I wasn't too impressed with everything that had happened but James has always been very difficult. He gets very manipulative. Now we get on really well. I'm telling you, without that discipline that kid would be out of hand right now."

Elizabeth doesn't remember her mother ever hitting her with unnecessary or unreasonable force.

"It was only ever open hand, on the buttocks. I'm very opinionated. I hold a grudge for a very long time. I wouldn't say this just for the sake of mum - sorry mum, but I wouldn't."

But Elizabeth's brother Peter, now 21, testified in court against his mother, saying Jane frequently lashed out in anger. Elizabeth scoffs: he left home at 16 and doesn't have a clue, she says. "Everytime someone comes out with the truth someone else comes out with an even bigger lie," says Jane.

Later, in the lounge after the others have gone to bed, Jane says Peter blames her for his violent upbringing - unjustly, she thinks.

"At the end of the day it was my choice. But I felt pressured to [marry her second husband]. The church told me I would go to hell if I had sex out of wedlock. I was just powerless to make an informed decision. I felt powerless."

She leaps up and says she wants to read me something: her favourite scripture, Isaiah 54. It's highlighted in orange. She reads it furtively and repeats the bits that really speak to her. "See, Yahweh [God] will always be there. It doesn't matter what's said against me because I am loved. My children will be taught by Yahweh. Everything I've done wrong will be put right.

"You can think the worst or you can think the best. This CYFS case is good because I can raise public awareness if people are aware that CYFS operates like this."

Jane says she now finds it hard to sleep. Her brain doesn't switch off. She will stay here, sometimes until three or four in the morning, sometimes with the Bible, sometimes with Sudoku, contemplating her life over a cup of Milo.

"Everyone's going to be judged, whether they believe it or not. We're going to feel all the good we've done to other people, and all the bad, and for some people that's going to be hell. I'm not perfect but there's more good and right with me than there's wrong. I haven't always got it right with my children, but I've never abused them. My mistake was getting involved with these men who were violent."