The Evil Of The Anti-Smacking Law Proved
An
analysis of Peter Hughes’ review
By Garnet Milne, B.A., B.D., PhD
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The new law took away protection of a parent for
disciplining his child. Formerly he was permitted by section 59 of the Crimes Act
to discipline a child by using ‘reasonable force’. A review was recently tabled
in Parliament by Peter Hughes, the CEO of the Ministry of Social Development,
which is full of misinformation and misrepresentations of the truth.
The media have done a
very poor of reporting this review. The New Zealand Herald, New Zealand’s
leading newspaper, is typical. It simply parrots the findings of the review and
fails to do any analysis in the report itself. It asks no searching questions
and offer no criticisms. However, the report does indeed raise questions and
invite criticism.
Let us consider the report in light of the Herald’s
sympathetic regurgitation of Hughes’ conclusions
The Herald reporter writes:
In the report,
Ministry of Social Development head Peter Hughes said he could find no evidence
that parents were being subject to "unnecessary state intervention"
for occasionally lightly smacking their children
Notice that he can find no evidence. This is either a
misrepresentation of the facts, or Hughes is blind to the evidence, for he
gives the evidence himself in his report. He acknowledges that there have been
20 reports ‘of smacking passed to the police’ in the previous fifteen months.
That represents 20 families who have had the indignity of the state’s agencies
violate their home. Even one parent treated as a potential criminal because
someone is aware he has smacked his children is bad enough. But here they admit
20 families have been so violated by unnecessary state intervention. The police
went out and investigated these reports.
The Herald also
reports ‘A review of the "anti-smacking" law has found no increase
in the number of parents being investigated or prosecuted for light smacking’.
This statement is akin to saying ‘there has been no increase in the number of
home invasions this year’. There might have been 10 or 20 of 50, but there has
been no increase. That is reassuring isn’t it? The fact is that since the
legislation there has been a manifold increase compared to previously. This is
a devious statement if ever there was one. See below where the data Hughes is
using shows that since the legislation has been enacted reports of ‘light
smacking’ have doubled. This doesn’t even take into account the police
admission that their figures are just ‘estimates.’ Nor does it tell us just
what these 3 reports of smacking were about prior to the law change. They were
probably serious assaults, and it would be very interesting here to see if the
police had doctored the results. Furthermore, how were these three reports to
the police handled in the three months prior to the legislation? Hughes should
have told us whether the police investigated them, since as the law stood then
it was no offence to smack your child.
But notice that the
Herald also reports the review to say that there has been a,
significant rise in
the reporting, apprehension, and prosecution of violent crime, including within
families. But it says police and Child, Youth, and Family have not changed the way
they respond to reports of light smacking or other minor acts of physical
discipline.
An important issue
arises from this statement. This ‘significant rise in violent crime’,
‘including within families,’ hides the cunning of the social engineers who sponsored
and brought to pass this anti-smacking law. Anything that is not considered
‘light smacking’ becomes ‘violent crime’. Remember that this anti-smacking
legislation outlaws using any implements like a wooden spoon. A little tap on
the fingers with a wooden spoon is considered a ‘violent crime’. It is not so
long ago, before corporal punishment was banned in schools, leather straps and
canes were used to punish children who needed it. And the object was to teach
them a lesson so that they would not repeat their bad behaviour. But now you
are a criminal if you use a cane or a leather strap or a wooden spoon. How much
of this ‘significant rise’ of ‘violent crime’, involves children getting
smacked with an implement to teach them a lesson? Hughes does not tell us,
because he does not know.
People have gone to jail
Just last week a woman was jailed for smacking her
child with a garden hose. She hit him because he wagged school. He reported his
parents to the police and now the family is in disarray and may not recover
from this interference. The judge in the case demonstrated his own ignorance of
social history when he made this comment as reported in the Herald: ‘Judge
Wade said the statue of Justice above London's Old Bailey court carried the
inscription: "Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the
Wrongdoer".’ The judge went on to moralise how he was doing the same
thing in this case.
Does he not realise that those who put that saying
there no doubt had Psalm 82 in mind ‘Defend the poor and
fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy’ (Ps 82:3). The same Bible
warrants corporal punishment. And when the saying was inscribed, corporal
punishment was universally approved as a biblical and often necessary form of
discipline?
This case also
highlights another evil from the advent of this legislation, which is what
happened in that situation. Children can threaten to report their parents to
the police. I have heard firsthand accounts of this very thing happening. The
review does not even mention this aspect where children now hold sway over
their parents, and the parents lose their authority in their own home and over
their own children.
100% increase in reporting parental smackers
What about this statement from the Herald?
A review of the
"anti-smacking" law has found no increase in the number of parents
being investigated or prosecuted for light smacking.
The legislation has only been enacted for a year so
how could there be an increase reported, especially when it comes to light
smacking? The fact is that there used to be no investigations or prosecutions
for light smacking. So when either occurs now, that is at least 100% increase.
Let the police give us hard data that when someone was reported as lightly
smacking their child prior to the law that parent was investigated at all.
Another misrepresentation of the facts
The review also says that:
police and Child,
Youth, and Family have not changed the way they respond to reports of light
smacking or other minor acts of physical discipline.
This too is a misrepresentation. The impression given
is that government agency CYFS and the police used to respond to reports of
light smacking or other ‘minor acts’ of physical discipline. The truth is that
neither the police nor CYFS used to respond at all because parents once had the
legal right to discipline their children. Now they investigate these reports
because a new law requires them to do so.
Notice too that since
child discipline has become assault the statistics have been skewed, for now
the term ‘child assault’ incorporates any form of physical discipline. Anything
the police consider not minor becomes assault on a child. The facts are that
there was one prosecution by the police for smacking and 14 cases of minor
discipline and 356 cases of ‘child assault’. A substantial part of the latter
are cases where children have been disciplined. What Hughes should have
investigated was how many of these 356 cases would have been acquittals under
the former section 59 of the Crimes Act which protected parents. He does not
even mention this obvious comparison.
A Further misrepresentation – ‘inconsequential smacks’
The Herald writes Hughes said in his report:
he was satisfied that
none of the prosecutions involved "inconsequential" smacks, with the victim
being punched, slapped, or hit multiple times on various parts of the body in
most cases.
Notice here that Mr Hughes becomes the authority on
what constitutes an ‘inconsequential smack’. And he plainly distinguishes
several hits with a strap or a slap with the hand from and ‘inconsequential
smack’. This is proof positive that this report is a farce - a joke, but which
is playing with the lives of decent New Zealanders and New Zealand families.
Why does ‘hit multiple times’ become different than multiple inconsequential
smacks?
And just a note about
‘inconsequential smacks’!. While he was in opposition, John Key devised
this phrase with his party being whipped to vote en block, for this
Labour/Green legislation to criminalise parents. He assured everyone that an
inconsequential smack would not invoke the law. But notice what this means. It
means that you cannot smack your child once or several times to change
their behaviour. This is specifically excluded from the legislation. A
parent should expect consequences from discipline, or it is unnecessary. To put
it another way, an ‘inconsequential’ smack is cruel and evil because the parent
is smacking the child without any reason or intended consequence.
What about this
misleading statement?
The data does not
suggest parents are being subject to more attention from the New Zealand police
in terms of responses to light smacking.
Again this is misinformation of the worst sort. The
implication here is that once the New Zealand police used to give some attention
to ‘light smacking’. The facts are that the police never bothered themselves by
interfering with a parent’s right to smack their child. So this statement is
meaningless. Obviously the police are paying a lot more attention responding to
light smacking as the statistics demonstrate, the statistics Hughes uses in his
report. In the past 15 months the police had investigated 20 reports of
smacking. Hughes can give no annual stats prior to that because there weren’t
any. So the correct statement should be, police involvement in parental
discipline when parents use a light smack has skyrocketed from nil to 20, and
this does not take into account verbal warnings given by police and not
reported. The bill became law in June 2007. The term ‘light smacking’ or the
use of ‘inconsequential’ was not part of the legal vocabulary for the police to
respond to. To introduce figures concerning ‘light smacking’ before the
institution of the law is to misuse statistics in the worst possible manner.
A confession that he does not have all the data to
support his whitewash of bad law
The report also confesses that:
The available data
does not allow me [Hughes] to conclusively discount the possibility that there
may have been isolated cases where practice was different.
In other words Hughes is admitting that children may
have been ‘subject to unnecessary state intervention for occasional lightly
smacking their children’. We have already exposed this as false since there
were 20 reports of precisely this thing happening. And parents have been
prosecuted for smacking and I am aware of one case in Nelson where the accused
was put through the ringer only to have the case dismissed in court. Just think
of the trauma this must have on a loving parent who is trying to bring his children
up correctly.
Hughes says that data
from the police does not ‘provide evidence of unwarranted investigation or
prosecution for the light smacking of children’. This too is a plain
misrepresentation since police have taken prosecutions which have been
dismissed. This must mean that their intervention and prosecution was
unwarranted. Also notice that Hughes never went to one parent who had been
investigated or prosecuted and asked his view of the situation. He is just
blindly parroting what he has been told by the police who are hardly going to
put themselves in a bad light.
Flawed data
Hughes also admits in his review that the government
agencies do not distinguish different types of violence on children when they
are reported. This is an admission that Hughes is using data which is next to
useless to decide whether an intervention was warranted or not: ‘Concerns are
not coded or classified by the type of abuse at the point of notification to
CYFS’
He also admits that
other government agencies might have gotten involved and he does nothing to try
and evaluate what happened in such cases:
Cases which were not
referred to a front line social worker may still have been the subject of
further action. This includes the provision of advice or the referral of the
family to another agency in order that assistance could be provided.
Yet Hughes makes sweeping statements about how there
was no undue interference of families as a result of this new law. Why does
Hughes not admit that not only have other agencies interfered with families,
but that primary school children are out of control, and that the high crime
rate among teens and younger is evidence of a wide spread lack of discipline in
the home and in society.
110,000 notifications in a population of 4 million
If you see me smacking my child and you report me to
the police or CYPS, I become part of the statistics of ‘substantiated cases’ of
family violence. In 2008/2009 there were over 110,000 notifications and 2855
‘substantiated cases’. Later he admits,
Advice, or assistance
from other agencies, will have been provided to many of the families who were
the subject of notifications that did not proceed to an investigation.
In sifting through these no doubt many a family had
strangers from government departments intruding into their families and lives.
Hughes admits that the rate of increase of notifications had ‘risen markedly
since 2007’. In fact they had risen from 89000 to 110000. This huge jump occurs
after the anti-smacking law came into force.
Police guessing becomes basis of Hughes’ conclusions
Remember that Hughes admits that the police are only
guessing how many smacking cases were reported to them: ‘They (the police) have
analysed offender data to estimate which type of events are most likely to
include a section 59 type issue’. Notice they are only estimating or guessing
and do not have the information in their records to give any accurate data.
In his Table 2,
Hughes reports that the police claim that violence against children by parents,
in the three months prior to the anti-smacking law coming into force, involved
a total of 95 cases. In the five periods after it became law they jumped from
95 to 111, 288, 258, 279 and 127 respectively. These are dramatic increases. He
does not give us data for the whole year prior to the anti-smacking law because
no doubt it would highlight even more the dramatic jump in police involvement.
The police even claim that they received 3 reports of smacking in the three months
prior to the law taking effect, but averaged out for the next 5 periods 7.2 per
period - well over a 100% increase. Just think how the 36 families and parents
who were investigated by the police felt about it. Surely Hughes is talking
nonsense when he claims that there was no undue interference. He says that
there is no discernable trend, while I have shown that there is an obvious
doubling of reports, if these police ‘estimates’ are accurate. Hughes appears
to have deliberately ignored these facts. Did they not fit his preconceived
views that the anti-smacking bill was good law? That is a possible explanation.
The police claim that
only 1 parent was prosecuted for smacking. Even one is one too many. But notice
that other minor acts of physical discipline amounted to 14. All of these were
unwarranted prosecutions if the discipline was only minor. The parents were
merely following the biblical injunction to spare rod and spoil the child (See
Proverbs 13:24, 22:15).
The level of New Zealand family violations would
become 1400 families in the US
14 prosecutions for smacking in New Zealand would
transform into 1400 prosecutions in a place like the United States. And this
takes no account of the ‘warnings’, mandatory counselling or other state
interventions into families.
Moreover, reporting
on what police call serious assaults has jumped from an average of around 850
in the previous two years to an average of 1326 in 2007 and 2008. This again is
a massive increase in reporting. And remember a serious assault is classed as
hitting someone with a rod or strap. No doubt there were some examples of
extreme and unwarranted violence against children, but it is equally true that
the statistics hide corporal punishment of children given in an appropriate and
wise manner by loving parents.
Shipping containers becoming prisons
There is no doubt that New Zealand is a violent
society. Our prisons are full and we are building new ones out of shipping
containers to house new criminals. Added to this the courts are weak and
controlled by liberal judges who hand out pathetic sentences, meaning that
criminals are released back into the community far more quickly than is the
case in many other countries similar to New Zealand.
This increase in
violence has occurred since schools were prohibited from using corporal
punishment, and there is evidence that atrocious behaviour at school, in the
home, vandalism against property and crime generally increases every year. The
government of the day, aided and abetted by the opposition (National) and who
have since become the government, has introduced a law which criminalises
parents, has the police investigate if a child is seen being smacked in a
supermarket or at home, and has enabled rebellious children to threaten their
parents with police involvement if they are given, or even threatened with,
corporal punishment. We can no longer legally smack our children with hand or
implement to correct or to cause a consequence of improved behaviour.
86% in a referendum
A recent referendum on this subject showed that an
overwhelming 86% of voters wanted this legislation repealed and parents no
longer criminalised. John Key and the National government have ignored the
desire of the people. This demonstrates that New Zealanders are willing to vote
into government politicians who are not family-friendly, have no regard for
biblical morality and who are quite happy to have government agencies
interfering in the lives of decent New Zealanders who are bringing up their
children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. And they try and claim that
they are a conservative and ‘right wing’ party. All they are conserving is the
social engineering of the former government they tried to deride as a
nanny-state. Surely John Key is just Helen Clark in drag.
We must obey God rather than man
I know that many parents continue to smack their
children and continue to use a physical rod or implement to teach the lesson
which needs to be learnt. And genuine Christians will not capitulate to the
social engineering this kind of evil legislation represents. As Christians we
obey the Word of God before any government or official. When the authorities
ordered the apostles not to preach the whole counsel of God, they responded ‘We
ought to obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29). To force a Christian to not
bring up his child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6) is an act of
tyranny. This government is, therefore, tyrannical.
Many government
agents including the police, who are called upon to enforce this law, believe
the law to be wrong. And no doubt many police hit their own children if needed.
I call upon all these men and woman to stand up and say that you will not
criminalise or investigate cases of parental discipline which were deemed
acceptable prior to June 2007. If you had the courage to do this, the
government would be forced to change its mind and repeal this godless
legislation. The police union would be doing all New Zealanders a great favour
if they took the lead in this. Any human being who fails to do good in defiance
of a tyrannical government, when he has the opportunity to do so, becomes just
as culpable as that government. And God will hold him accountable. It is a
biblical principle that the moral Law, the Ten Commandments’, lays an
obligation on all, not only to not do what God prohibits, but also to
positively perform its opposite. When we are told not to kill (Exodus 20:13),
we are to do everything in our power for the well-being of our neighbour just
as surely as we are prohibited from thrusting a knife into his heart. We are to
do this in the context of our respective callings.
We also know that
there are many in the National Party caucus, who disagree with the
anti-smacking law and yet they voted for it in parliament. This is unforgivably
hypocritical, and MPs should have the courage to come out and acknowledge that
they think the law is wrong, confess their cowardliness – and then should do
something about it. That this hypocritical voting practice could occur
demonstrates none to subtly that our system of government is flawed and
corrupt. We can only pray that God will raise up truly godly political leaders
who will honour Him in all their duties. New Zealand will reap the whirlwind of
this post-‘enlightenment’ liberalism and we will become even more unsafe as a
society than we already are. The failure to adequately discipline children at
school and at home will make this a certainty. Man remains a fallen creature as
all the evidence proves.
The full review by Peter Hughes can be found here.
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/release+section+59+review
or
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/20091110%20CE%20Monitoring%20Report%20on%20s59.pdf
Special reading
The Trip to
Nowhere
By Professor Jacob W. F. Sundberg
A
misguided crusade that will break up families
By Lynette Burrows
How to control Adults by means of
'children's rights'
By Lynette Burrows
Message from Sweden
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
The Smacking Law Hypocrisy
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
The Empresses' new clothes or Smacking: Those
Kiwis must be crazy!
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
Bradford's Bill will create new criminals
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
Child
rearing: Too many cooks...
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
The
Destruction of a Family: The case of the Family of seven children
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
"Riding
crop" case: Big News Blogspot”, 25 July 2005
Smacking children is
not harmful
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson
Confiscating
children: When parents become victims
By Ruby Harrold-Claesson