TABOOS
The consequences of Sweden's anti-smacking laws for family life should
be a warning to Britain, reports James Heartfield
Smacking parents
By James Heartfield
|
This article is published
in the June 1999 issue of LM magazine. It is published here with the
kind consent of the author. |
Due
from the Home Office: a consultation paper on whether parents should be allowed
to discipline their children with a smack. Last year the European Court of
Human Rights ruled against the British courts' decision that a man who caned
his stepson was within his rights. The appeal to the European court by boy 'A'
was supported by the British government, suggesting that New Labour favours a
change in the law.
One
person the home secretary ought to consult before deciding is the Swedish
lawyer Ruby Harrold-Claesson. She has been standing up for parents fined and
imprisoned under that country's 'anti-smacking' law, passed in 1979, and also
for the children, denied contact with their families after being fostered.
Jamaican-born Harrold-Claesson is Sweden's only black lawyer, and the chair of
the Nordic Committee of Human Rights. We met while she was in London, drawing
attention to the unintended, but terrible consequences of Sweden's law on
smacking.
|
'TO FAIL
TO DISCIPLINE A CHILD IS REAL CRUELTY' |
A
23-year old Eritrean refugee, raising her two girls on her own, was sentenced
to one year's imprisonment for having spanked her youngest daughter, aged six.
The children were placed in an orphanage. They spoke no Swedish and thought
that the police had taken their mother away and shot her, as the Ethiopian
police might have. A stepfather who slapped his two boys, aged 11 and 12, after
they were caught stealing, was imprisoned for a year. A young Thai widow who
slapped her 14-year old daughter's face was imprisoned for a month, and all
four of her children taken from her to a foster home. The 15-year old daughter
of a Bosnian refugee was fostered after her mother disciplined her with a belt.
The foster parents' address was kept secret from her family. As Harrold-Claesson
says, 'the law targets immigrant parents, and parents with strong religious
beliefs'. According to Sweden's National Board of Welfare, no immigrant can
avoid prosecution by referring to the child-rearing practices in his home
country.
The
Swedish law is supposed to protect children. But according to Harrold-Claesson,
'the effect on children is devastating: they lose contact with their families
and their playmates to be "replanted in new soil'. She says that 'real
abusers are more devious than the parents who discipline their children out of
love, hiding nothing'. But the real damage is done by the law itself: 'To fail
to discipline a child, not to give it any boundaries, is real cruelty.' In
Sweden even sending, a child to his room, 'room arrest', is illegal, seen as
cruel treatment and deprivation of liberty.
Harrold-Claesson
objects that the authorities start out with an assumption that 'the family is
principally bad - in Sweden the family does not count'. Through the crazy
theories of psychologists, ordinary family relationships are viewed with
suspicion. 'One mother I defended was accused of having a "sick symbiotic
relationship" with her daughter - they meant that she loved her.' Where
parents are unable to cope because of problems like alcoholism or addiction,
the social services stop grandparents from taking the children in, on the
grounds that they are to blame for the parents' shortcomings - they raised them
that way.
Harrold-Claesson
has successfully defended many parents against imprisonment, even taking Sweden
to the European Court itself. For her efforts she has been marked down as a
troublemaker. 'I'm branded as a child abuser', she says, matter-of-factly. Now
the courts in Gothenburg stop her defending parents, by refusing to appoint her
as a public defender. 'You are not to talk about human rights in Sweden,
because we are supposed to have them already', she says.
In
the 1980's right-wing governments in America and Britain tried to enforce
personal morality in the name of 'family values'. That led to bigotry and
discrimination. Those 'problem families' that failed to live up to the ideal
were pushed around, and sometimes broken up. But the reaction against 'family
values' is in some senses even worse.
For
many caring professionals it seems that there is a predilection to believe the
worst of ordinary families. Their reverse image of the 'family values' ideal is
the assumption that all families are potential sites of abuse. If Sweden is
anything to go by, a British law against what many consider to be normal
parental discipline could act as a green light to childcare professionals to
break up families, imprison parents and send children to secret foster homes.