UNLESS the public get involved in the discussion about smacking, it will soon be illegal in Scotland to tap your child lightly on the hand or bottom. Parents will run the risk of being criminalised, sacked from certain jobs, made unemployable even – because they committed an act of ‘violence’ against their child.
The fact that smacking is carried out as a form of discipline by a loving parent seems not to matter to the politicians and experts who are pushing through John Finnie's Children (Equal Protection from Assault) Bill.
As a result, fear and distrust between parents and professionals is likely to grow: "little Johnny tells me you smacked his bottom yesterday, I’m afraid I’ve had to report this abuse". Families could be split up and lives destroyed by ensuing investigations while the police face being overwhelmed by trivial complaints, as one officer argued in his submission to the equalities commission in Holyrood.
In opinion polls we find that 85 per cent of Scots were smacked when they were children, 74 per cent oppose the criminalisation of smacking, and 78 per cent are concerned that police and social work will be flooded with trivial cases.
Yet, in Holyrood, these opinions are reversed, with 73 per cent of the 109 MSPs voting to make the mildest of smacks a criminal offence.
This smacking bill, rather than reflecting the view of the majority, encapsulates a minority perspective that is being forced upon ordinary parents and communities in Scotland. Something that is normal and unremarkable for the greatest number of people is being transformed into something criminal and immoral, a form of child abuse, by a small section of society who hold positions of authority – the new elite.
Gone, it seems, are the days when politicians attempted to win arguments through reasoned and inclusive public debate. Today, they look to the law, to the police and to professional experts who increasingly propose coercive measures to change our behaviour and eventually, they hope, our minds.
The new political class call on right-thinking "experts" to find them facts and figures to justify their prejudices, often relying on dubious advocacy research to construct what they like to call evidence-based policy. They portray it as an open democratic process but the opposite is the case. Holyrood is not talking with ordinary people but with like-minded professionals in committees that act as echo chambers reverberating with ideas and arguments that lack basic common sense.
During my testimony to the equalities commission I was told that smacking a child is the same as hitting a woman, and that in defending the right of parents to smack their children I embodied an authoritarian view akin to that of a 19th century slave owner. Did I not understand that by smacking my child’s bottom I was helping to create a future generation of violent offenders?
If you go online and watch the smacking bill sail effortlessly through the committee stage and now through the Scottish Parliament, you will see our new elite in action. Contemptuous of public opinion, standing above-and-beyond the lives of ordinary people, they communicate in an empty technical language replete with legalistic jargon.
Their talk of "evidence" scarcely masks their underlying contempt for parents, and indeed children, all of whom they understand to be mindless perpetrators and victims in an ever-spiralling culture of abuse. Within their deliberations, the lived reality that loving parents occasionally smack their children because they are naughty, and that this is not a form of violence or abuse, has become heresy.
We need to oppose these liberal authoritarians and give the people a real voice in politics.
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