Some people go to extraordinary lengths to justify hitting children. Adults in the Bright family believe the right to smack is essential to good parenting, as they openly told viewers of BBC's documentary A Good Smack? this week. They hit their children in private, and usually follow up with a nice hug, probably to show there are no hard feelings. No hard feelings? Not according to children themselves, writes Medb Ruane.
Children hate being smacked. They say it is painful and humiliating, and although older children often understand their parents were angry at the time, they still don't like it. The Scottish parliament takes their words so seriously that members have now passed legislation banning any smacking of children under three, and restricting the way that parents can physically punish the over-threes. The decision is historic.
Will others follow? This week witnessed new examples of the rising trend of assaults against young children in Ireland. One adult had damaged a three-year old boy so badly the child needed intensive care; another had bitten an infant's ear. Both cases are worlds away from the short, sharp smack some parents administer when children won't toe the line, but if the macro-scene shows a progressive worsening of violence against children, rethinking what happens in the micro-world of home may be timely.
Adults who were smacked as children tend to take two particular lines on the experience: either they see it as unfair/ineffective, or they say it did them no harm in the long run. But children don't agree.
When Goretti Horgan interviewed children in Northern Ireland families for Save the Children, fewer than three in every 20 children thought it was OK for adults to hit them. They felt humiliated and deeply aggrieved.
The children used the following words to talk about being hit: "hurt, sad, sore, upset, unhappy, unloved, heartbroken, awful". They were sore outside, and inside. Those "inside" feelings intensified as the children grew older, with some believing that their parents didn't really love them deep down. They confided that they wouldn't hit their own children when they became parents, because it was setting a bad example, and anyway, they wouldn't want their children to feel the way they did now.
"I wouldn't hit them because you wouldn't set a good example taking out your anger", said a nine-year-old girl, "and if you had a bad day at work and they just got on your nerves, you should just walk away and not hit them and play fair". Most parents who smack their children don't mean to hurt them so deeply and would be shocked to realise the effect their actions have, as Horgan points out in It's a HIT, not a Smack. What parents may forget is that although they may know the level of physical punishment beyond which they won't go, their children do not.
A child who is smacked for some misdemeanour has no way of rationalising the experience and ranking the level of threat. In the child's eyes, the "good" parent who gives him a swipe may be much more forceful next time round. The parent knows she is not going to bite the child's ear off or throw him against a wall; the child who experiences hurt from the person he loves most has no context in which to reach the same conclusion.
Policy, or rather non-policy, on smacking children in Ireland has evolved so far on the basis of what adults say, with the it-did-me-no-harm rationale winning out against children's own reports. But adults who deny the impact of having been smacked suffer from two primary influences.
First is the obvious limitation of using hindsight that is years out of date. Second is the need to hold in your heart an image of your own parent as good, loving and true. To admit your parents hurt you might be seen as disloyal or as acknowledging they were less than you would have liked them to be.
The rising trend of serious assaults against children makes the debate about smacking appear almost privileged. Why worry, when more serious assaults are taking place every day? Pro-child activists and researchers can summon mountains of research that demonstrate links between even the simplest forms of physical punishment and child development into adult life.
Whatever about the long-term, the effects of smacking reach outside the family almost as soon as the smacking starts. Although pro-smacking campaigners insist there is nothing wrong with a slap delivered as a last resort by a caring parent, that same caring parent may be teaching her child a negative way of resolving a situation fast. Other people's smacking behaviour puts you and your children at greater risk.
Even in kindergarten, children whose mothers smack them attack other children twice as often as the children of mothers who don't. Children whose mothers use harsher physical punishment attack other children four times as frequently. Teenage boys whose parents smack them are more likely to hit their parents in later life, while boys who endure regular physical chastisement are much more likely to hit their girlfriends later on. Increasing numbers of girls are hitting back.
The debate about smacking isn't only about parents' rights to chastise their children physically. Like passive smoking, it is also about how their decisions may hurt everyone else.