15/2/00

Smacking Bottoms

Just before Christmas of 1999, you might recall an incident where a father - a teacher - was arrested because he had smacked his daughter when she refused to leave the dentist's waiting room to go and have a tooth examined. The child had been suffering considerable pain from her tooth for the previous two weeks. It had kept her awake at night despite the use of strong painkillers. The father was desperate to sort out the problem there and then - before the Christmas period - because the dentist was becoming impatient and was going to cancel the appointment.

When the father was arrested he was put in a police cell for five hours. During this period of time both of his children were taken away by the social services. The father was told that he would not be allowed to see the children. The result was that on Christmas Eve the mother and the two children had no father. As the mother recalls, her children were sobbing their eyes out for the whole evening.

For the whole Christmas period the children and the mother were separated from their father. He was not allowed to enter his own house.

This father was actually charged with assault, and at the ensuing trial he was given what the Scottish courts call an 'admonishment'. This father was the first parent ever in this country convicted simply for smacking his child.

He was also sacked from his teaching post of 20+ years.

They lived in constant fear that someone might turn up at the door to take the children away.

On Channel 3's Tonight Programme the father described how he and his wife were now living in an absolute nightmare situation. They lived in constant fear that someone might turn up at the door to take the children away. They feared more accusations. For example, children often injure themselves accidentally, and they felt that, should this occur, the social services and the police would be knocking at the door to take the children away again for more interrogations and more examinations - something that is a common occurrence these days.

Can politicians and media people imagine what everyone in this family was put through over this two-week Christmas period? Can they just reflect on this for a moment? Do they have any understanding of what it must be like for a child in this situation to have to testify in court against her own father? Can they appreciate what the emotional consequences for everyone in the family will be in the future?

Surely, this child has been subjected to an appalling act of emotional abuse. 

This child's security was totally undermined in a number of ways. She was hauled off by uncaring strangers from the social services. She was intrusively interrogated and interviewed for hours. She was aware that her father had been arrested and refused access to her over Christmas. She will have internalised the pain and anguish of both her parents, and she will have continued to do so as both of the parents thereafter lived in fear of an uncertain future and she detected this both consciously and unconsciously. 

"Do anything that we don't approve of, and we'll get you. All of you. Including the children."

The child-abuse hysterics win again, don't they? They have damaged the man in this family, they have poisoned the relationship with his children, they have undermined the children's security and their happiness with family life, and they have got the message out to all our fathers. "Do anything that we don't approve of, and we'll get you. All of you. Including the children."

But for most of those working in the child-abuse industry, such damage to our children and to their families matters not a jot.

Their aim is to shatter those families bit by bit so that they can continue to justify their existence and their funding.

And if you think that this is an exaggeration, then please think very carefully about why, for example, organisations such as the NSPCC have, for the past three decades, been telling ALL those children who have been abused that they "will be damaged for life".

If you care about someone, the very last thing you would do is to persistently drum into their heads that they have been damaged for life following some incident.

But the NSPCC has been doing this very forcefully for three whole decades This organisation, clearly, does not care about children at all!

What it cares about is itself!

And if it can rake in the donations by telling everybody that children who have been abused will be damaged for life then, regardless of how badly this might affect the children, it will do this.

And the very same is true with regard to the smacking issue.

These child-abuse organisations will say anything, and do anything - even if it hurts our children - in order to get funding.

And the result has been that, bit by bit, the parents - especially the fathers - and, indeed, most of the rest of society - have been forced to back off from the children in their midst; lest they be accused of some form of 'abuse'. 

And even if, for example, no parent ever smacked a child again, these child-abuse organisations would then portray some other action as being 'abusive' in order to keep generating their income.

they will never stop expanding their definitions of 'abuse'

In other words, they will never stop expanding their definitions of 'abuse' so that they can continue to justify their existence.

Indeed, some child 'experts' have recently tried to claim that shouting is an act of abuse, and so is calling a child 'naughty'.

And as the fathers back away, perhaps throwing in the towel altogether and leaving the family home or, perhaps, just bothering less with the children lest they put a foot wrong, so it is that the children become more dysfunctional and more difficult to control. So it is that the mothers have to do more of the work. So it is that the problems in our communities get worse, particularly with regard to the behaviour of the boys. And so it goes on.

NSPCC Muddled Over Smacking

Extract from the NSPCC's website ...

...

"The NSPCC is hugely disappointed that the government's paper rules out the option of giving children the same legal protection from assault as adults. Playing around with legal definitions of how and in what circumstances children can be hit is a recipe for confusion and fear for parents and keeps children at risk.

... The NSPCC with many other organisations and individuals will be urging the government to give children the same legal protection from assault as adults and establish the principle that no child should be hit ever."

...

However, if you follow the NSPCC's devious line of reasoning - viz; that children and their parents should have the same physical and emotional barriers placed between them as do adults - mostly stranger adults, then, presumably, ... 

Forcing children to go to visit grandpa = 'kidnap'

Forcing children to do homework = 'mental cruelty'

Sending child to room  = 'wrongful imprisonment'

Fining child pocket money = 'extortion' or 'theft'

Sending child to bed = 'solitary confinement'

Turning out the light = 'sensory deprivation'

Making the child wash the dishes = 'slave labour'

Making girl wear a skirt = 'malicious sexism'

Refusing child a sweet = 'infringement of civil liberty'

Making child read Bible = 'subversive indoctrination'

Forcing child to kiss grandma = 'sexual abuse'

Of course, the above notions seem preposterous but, take it from me, this is where those working in the child-abuse industry will take us if we keep allowing them to get away with what they are doing. These people want to disempower the parents in order to profit from the process and from the result.

The truth of the matter is, again, that this hysteria over children being smacked has achieved nothing but produce more damaged children and more damaged adults.

And by using the term 'hit' instead of 'smack', the NSPCC turns a relatively trivial action into an act of abuse. It is the old hysteria-and-accuse game, but it poisons almost every parent in the country. And it insidiously poisons us against our own parents, most of who probably gave us an appropriate whack when we got too far out of hand and, perhaps, they could no longer cope.

Indeed, a whack probably saved many of us from taking the 'wrong track' when we were young. It probably saved a mountain of aggravation within the household, thus saving a lot of psychological pain and suffering for the whole of the family. And it almost certainly helped many of us to grow up into better citizens.

Furthermore, most parents who have smacked have very rarely employed such an admonishment more than a few times throughout the entire course of their children's lives.

The mere fact that the sanction is available is usually enough!

The NSPCC simply damages families by claiming that trivial admonitions such as smacking are 'acts of abuse

The NSPCC simply damages families by claiming that trivial admonitions such as smacking are 'acts of abuse', but I consider it an act of abuse to deny parents the appropriate tools for bringing up their children properly. And I consider it an act of abuse when the NSPCC poisons children against their own parents.

END NOTE: 

There are, of course, often better ways than smacking for keeping children in line. But, firstly, this is not always true by any means.

Secondly, parents and other children also have a right to a decent life and family without having them continually soured by poorly-behaved children (which often means that bad situations have to be dealt with quickly)

Thirdly, the more that parents are undermined, the more undermined are all our children.