An editorial in the Lancet for July 1 offers some warnings and some good advice
to those parents who feel the urge to batter their offspring at moments of provocation
and domestic tension.
It quotes a report submitted to the United Kingdom Institute for Public Policy
Research by Christina M. Lyon, director of the Centre for the Study of the Child,
the Family and the Law at the University of Liverpool. This concludes that over
the past 40 years research has consistently demonstrated that hitting children
(which includes slapping and spanking as well as inflicting pain with some instrument
or other) increases their chance of developing aggression, delinquency and criminal
behaviour later in life. In addition to this effect, hitting a child may impair
its cognitive development and so involve a lifelong disability.
The official line taken by the Government is that, however we choose to interpret
human rights legislation, to outlaw all forms end degrees of physical punishment
of a child by its parent would be unacceptable in practice. Nevertheless, smacking
a child on the head or striking it with a weapon cannot be admitted as permissible
under any circumstances. A recent opinion in the UK has indicated that most
adults do not accept smacking as an effective method of disciplining a child.
And the task of defining what is meant by “reasonable chastisement”
is impossible.
“Given the acute physical effects of severe smacking and the long-term
sequelae of chastisement”, runs the editorial, “health professionals
have an important role in transforming opinion in those countries where children
are still beaten.’’ In any case, physical chastisement is in the last
resort an admission that the parent is incapable of coping with a child and
casts doubt on the stability and maturity of the chastiser.