Scotland will become the first region in the UK to introduce a ban on parents smacking their children. Should those who care for children cheer? I have my doubts. You’d think from the media rhetoric around this change in the law that there are huge numbers of parents who are about to be restrained from belting the hell out of their kids.

This misanthropic image is untrue. The vast majority of parents love their kids and would never dream of harming them, whether they occasionally smack or not. For the tiny minority, there are already laws in place to stop abuse. Scottish law, for example, already bans the use of an “implement” as is shaking or striking a child on the head.

So outlawing all physical punishment of children - with no exemptions - will not make children safer. Instead, it will treat thousands of ordinary mums and dads as no different to violent thugs, vulnerable to criminal charges, for merely disciplining their children with a benign smack.

A high-handed attack

Whether you approve of smacking or not, this law change has dangerous implications. Critics warn it could open the floodgates to thousands of minor incidents being reported to an overstretched police service. But it’s also a high-handed attack on family autonomy. Modern Britain is not some Handmaiden’s Tale dystopia. We rightly charge parents, not the state, with caring for their own children, including correcting them where necessary. Teachers should be cautious too, as this is also a broader assault on the very concept of “discipline” that threatens to have a knock-on effect on attitudes to behaviour policies in schools. 

I assumed that educators might share my qualms. However, when I opposed the Welsh consultation on a total smacking ban earlier this year, I was flabbergasted that so many - from not only the progressive wing but also so-called “traditionalists” - piled in to accuse me of justifying cruelty against children. Tweets such as: “You’re enabling abuse”; “So it’s OK to beat vulnerable children?”; “What next, bring back the birch?” were hurled at me.

Rational debate on smacking is made particularly fraught because of professional doublespeak. We have been warned that the word “smack…sounds cuddly and cutesy”; instead we should say “hit, attack, or assault” and there is a tendency to condemn those who oppose the law with malign intent. Sally Holland, the children’s commissioner for Wales, declared that she was “disappointed and saddened” that parents would campaign for their “right to hit children”.

Why parents smack

The anti-smacking lobby’s stance is to conflate a loving mum’s gentle smack with an act of violence. But we need some all-important context to untangle these contested meanings. Violence is the use of physical force intended to injure or abuse. Smacking - in contrast - is sometimes used by caring parents, to discipline their child, to show that certain behaviour is unacceptable. It is absolutely not intended to cause injury. It is shameful to insinuate otherwise.

There is a different, but nonetheless parallel context for teachers, who are also charged with disciplining youngsters. Many advocates of a total ban on smacking are opposed to all forms of “power-assertive methods” of disciplining children, viewing adult authority per se as a slippery slope to authoritarianism.

Anti-smacking campaigners such as Andy James, the chairman of the campaign group Children are Unbeatable welcomes the law changes because: “Children should have the same protection from the law that we enjoy as adults…No-one has a right to hit another person, or to punish and control them.” But think of the profound implications for the whole process of educating if we claim that children should be treated no differently to adults. After all, every day, teachers “force” pupils to wear uniforms, demand that they call them Sir or Miss, stand up when they enter the room and so on. You wouldn’t dream of treating an adult this way.

The readiness to associate the exercise of parental authority with “abuse” is matched by denunciations of zero tolerance. “Ready to Learn” initiatives are regularly condemned as “oppressive”.  Strict teachers who believe in educational “tough love” are almost likened to borstal prison guards. The principal of Great Yarmouth Charter Academy was vilified as a “Sergeant Major-type character”, defamed as brutal and uncaring for his extreme behaviour proposals at the start of the new term.

Stigmatising sanctions

I am more sympathetic to Drew Povey from the Channel 4 series Educating Greater Manchester than the uber-strict Michaela Community School, but I felt queasy when self-styled “nice teacher” Hannah Sokoya, writing for Tes, caricatured a “boot camp approach to discipline…barking orders and humiliation…needless, unrealistic rules mercilessly crushing the spirit of both student and teacher”. The truth is: putting someone in detention is not forcible imprisonment of a minor, any more than a mother spanking a child is abusive violence.

This stigmatisation of sanctions, whether at home or school, is a worrying trend. Psychiatrist David Eberhard explains in his book How The Children Took Power that Sweden’s 1978 smacking ban law has had a negative impact on generational power relations, leaving children disoriented by a lack of clarity about what is expected of them. Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, notes that classroom discipline “relies on the acceptance by society that the teacher is in charge, which we have lost.”

But what respect will teachers earn from society if they treat parents’ best efforts at discipline as violently criminal? How do teachers imagine that those same parents will give them permission to be in charge in the classroom? To smack or not to smack is not the question. We owe it to children to set boundaries. In the respective contexts of home and school that requires opposing the erosion of autonomy and authority of both parents and educators alike. 

This and many other related issues will be discussed at the 100+ panel debates at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Barbican during the weekend Oct 28-29. Tes is the education media partner for the festival.  www.battleofideas.org.uk

Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas and a former FE teacher. She tweets as @Fox_Claire

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