I was once invited to talk to a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust about depression. My experience of National Childbirth Trust people was that they were well educated, concerned, aware and critical women and men. In the part of my talk where I was outlining the links between childhood experiences and adult depression I was suddenly interrupted by a young woman, nursing a small baby, who was sitting near me.
She said, ‘Can I ask you a question? It’s going back to something you said. I didn’t want to stop you in full flow.’
I detected a note of hostility.
‘It’s what you said about not beating children. Don’t you think children need to be hit. How else will they learn?’
She went on, passionately, to describe how she disciplined her two elder children. (I assumed, hopefully, that she was not talking about the baby as well.) She had a wooden spoon called ‘Mr Henry’ with which she hit them whenever they misbehaved. ‘You can’t reason with young children,’ she said, and then she described to us how Mr Henry accompanied them wherever they went. If the children misbehaved in public she would take them to some place where they could not be seen and there Mr Henry would do his work. ‘I wouldn’t hit them in front of other people. That would embarrass them. Usually I don’t have to hit them. They know that if they are naughty Mr Henry will come out.’
I asked her whether she had been beaten as a child.
She said, ‘I was very unruly as a child, especially when my mother’s marriage was breaking up. I wasn’t beaten, just hit. I caused my mother a great deal of trouble.’
Some of the people in the room shared my sadness as she gave her detailed account of the punishments her small children received, but others supported her, claiming that all children were too wild and unruly to be brought up without some form of corporal punishment. One woman, who had earlier identified herself as someone who suffered greatly with depression, assured us that all the children who misbehaved themselves in the school where she taught came from homes where corporal punishment was never used.
The amount of physical violence used against children is greatly underestimated. I found that many of my clients regarded hitting their children as both normal and necessary. If I commented upon this, they usually said that they hit their children only when their children needed it and that they did not hit them as much as they themselves had been hit by their parents. I hoped that this was indeed so, for some of the troubled people I saw had been brutally treated by their parents. Nevertheless, I suspect that Alice Miller was right when she wrote, ‘Parents who beat their children very often see the image of their parents in the infant they are beating.’12 Many people find that one very effective way of getting rid of your own pain is to inflict pain on others. If it were not so, where would dictators find the people to man their concentration camps, death squads and torture chambers?
Many men see it as their prerogative to beat their wives and children whenever they wish to do so. Sometimes women thrash their children, but often it is the woman who stands helplessly by while her husband takes his temper out on the children. In such families the children often regard their mother as a saint, a woman who suffered at her husband’s hands for her children’s sakes. However, it is a truism in psychotherapy that it is not possible to have one good and one bad parent. If the good parent does not protect you from the bad parent, then you have two bad parents.
Parents often justify the violence they do to their children on the incompatible grounds that a) it is necessary in order to make the children good, and b) children do not remember what is done to them. If children do not remember what was done to them for being bad, how can they remember to be good?
As the law stands in the UK, Australia and the USA adults are protected from assault but children are not protected from assault by their parents and, in the majority of schools in Australia and the USA, by their teachers. Children Are Unbeatable, an alliance of organizations and individuals committed to changing the law so that children are protected, has fought long and hard for this to be achieved. The UK Children’s Commissioners, themselves appointed by the government, issued a statement on 22 January 2006, where they said in part
Children are the only people in the UK who can still be hit without consequence. The current and previous governments have made welcome progress by prohibiting all corporal punishment of children in schools, other institutions and forms of alternative care. In relation to parental corporal punishment, in England, Wales and Scotland the ancient common law defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ has been limited, but not removed completely; and in Northern Ireland the government has indicated that it plans to bring the law into line with that in England and Wales.
Children have the same right as adults to respect for their human dignity and physical integrity and to equal protection under the law, in the home and everywhere else. There is no room for compromise, for attempting to define ‘acceptable’ smacking. This has been confirmed by United Nations and Council of Europe human rights monitoring mechanisms, and by the Westminster Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights.
The UK has been told repeatedly since 1995 that to comply with its human rights obligations, the reasonable punishment defence must be removed completely in all four countries of the UK.13
The strongest opposition to any change in the law comes from some of the Christian churches whose members believe in following the Old Testament injunction, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. Adults who beat children protect themselves with a set of self-serving lies, typically, ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you’, ‘It’s for your own good’, and ‘I don’t beat my children, I just give them a tap’.
Yet this is not how young children experience a ‘tap’. In a study conducted by the National Children’s Bureau and Save the Children seventy-six five- to seven-year-olds were asked their definition of a smack. ‘The message from children is that a smack is a hit: on 43 occasions children described a smack as a hit, a hard hit, or a very hard hit.’ When a child described a smack as a hard hit her questioner asked, ‘Can it be a soft hit?’ The child replied firmly, ‘No’. A seven-year-old girl observed, ‘A smack is parents trying to hit you, but instead of calling it a hit they call it a smack.’ When asked why children usually get smacked a five-year-old girl said, ‘When I’m very naughty my mum smacks me’. Her questioner asked, ‘What is being very naughty?’ The little girl replied, ‘When you hit people a lot.’ Apparently her questioner refrained from asking whether her mother was being naughty when she hit her but no doubt the little girl had considered this question.
When asked what it felt like to be smacked, the children were clear that it was very unpleasant. A six-year-old boy said, ‘It feels like someone’s punched you or kicked you.’ A seven-year-old girl said, ‘It hurts and it’s painful inside - it’s like breaking your bones.’ Another seven-year-old girl said, ‘You feel like you don’t like your parents anymore.’ When asked how children feel after they have been smacked, only one child said that he learnt from his mistake.14
The knowledge that they are being harmed by the person who should be looking after them creates a conflict that children have to resolve in some way. Some children bravely face the truth that they have parents who are not the perfect parents they would wish for, but others choose to lie to themselves and to deny their own pain and fear. They tell themselves that they are bad and deserve to be punished, and they deny that the physical punishment actually hurts. The first choice destroys the child’s belief that she (and it is often a she) is valuable and acceptable, while the second destroys the child’s capacity for empathy. Boys who are repeatedly beaten tell themselves that they feel nothing, and they are rewarded for this lie by being admired by their peers for being tough. Seeing yourself as being wicked and deserving punishment, and destroying your capacity for empathy, has many bad outcomes. The research carried out by Murray Straus at the Family Research