New law to ban corporal punishment in the home
Parents face a new law that could prevent them from choosing how to discipline their own children
NELSPRUIT – A new proposed law to ban corporal punishment for parents has created heated debates countrywide on whether the banning of “spanking your children” is really a “good” thing in the long run. South African parents are soon to lose their freedom to corporally punish their children.
This after The Times reported that minister of social development, Ms Bathablile Dlamini announced that the government, in cooperation with children’s rights NGOs, is drafting a bill that would outlaw spanking at home. If it passes , parents will lose their freedom to discipline their own children in their own homes.
Mr Johan Bosch, operations manager of Child Welfare SA White River, Sabie and Graskop explained that corporal punishment in schools was banned after many years as it was one of the many violent tools used by the colonial and apartheid ruling class. He said for example, boys were (for a long time) physically disciplined to harden them and maintain domination through fear of authority.
Corporal punishment then could have at least partly be seen as one of the leftovers of nearly 350 years of apartheid. Some acts that the UN CRC include in its definition of corporal punishment is ”hitting children with a hand or object, kicking, shaking or throwing children, scratching, pinching, biting or pulling their hair, forcing them to stay in uncomfortable positions, locking or tying them up, burning and scalding”.
He concluded that as South Africa was one of the most violent countries in the world, people now had to relook at what they considered to be normal behaviour. Despite this, the country to first ban corporal punishments, Sweden has since the spanking ban had child abuse rates explode to over 500 per cent, according to their police reports.
Accounts state that even just one year after the prohibition took effect, and after a massive government public-education campaign, not only were Swedish parents resorting to pushing, grabbing, and shoving more than other countries parents, but they were also beating their children twice as often. The report also stated that after a decade of the ban, “rates of physical child abuse in Sweden had risen to three times the normal rate.”
Yet since Sweden, dozens of countries have banned parental corporal punishment, such as Germany, Italy, and in 2007 New Zealand. Even Women and Men against Child Abuse advocacy manager Ms Germaine Horowitz, said while they welcomed the new law against smacking children, they were concerned that, as the law was not able to prevent children being raped by family members, how was possibly going to stop them from being smacked?
“The law is as a positive development in caring for our children in that hopefully it raises awareness about what abuse is and how negative smacking is and can be to a child’s development. It will also force us to look at alternative more positive forms of discipline.”
