Hello Singledad, I think you have brought a lot of very pertinent points in the last post, and I thank you for it. It certainly brings reflection to a new level. And I think we can find a lot of common ground in many of these points.
singledad said:
Lets step away from spanking specifically, and look at the general concept of outlawing things that have been shown to be harmful to children. On the spectrum of "things that are bad for children", with spanking at the one extreme and lack of spinach on the other, where will you stop legislating, and start trusting parents? Can you see the slippery slope now?
I understand this concern. As you said, there are many, many different things that parents might do or not do and that can, in various way and degrees, harm children.
And you have a good point here that some of these things might harm children a lot more than, say, a mild form of spanking.
I don't disagree with that!
And I think you are completely right that legislating on some of these issues, as harmful as they might be, is going to be difficult and raise some important ethical questions as where we draw the limit.
For me, IMO, there is however a very important distinction between every one of these situations that have been shown to be harmful to children, and spanking.
The key, for me, is simple: hitting children, in any way, shape or form,
violates a person's rights. The charter for human rights is quite clear about this and it is universally accepted for adults; however for some strange reason that nobody wants to acknowledge amongst the defenders of spanking, when it's about children, these rights no longer seems to matter.
Through a ban on spanking, I am asking for children's rights to be respected as much as any other human being on the planet.
So, for me - the logic behind the ban is very different from an attempt to ban parent's practices that are harmful to children. For me, there is no slippery slope because the basis for this initiative is very clear cut: no other harmful parental practices, short of abuse itself, falls under the category of protecting human rights.
Just for the record, by the way, my personal stance on child rearing and the studies that lead me to this stance, lead me to advocate not only against spanking, but <I>
against any form of punishment</I>. I teach parents how to handle discipline without ever having to use any sort of threats, or resort to any use of force, and I do it with great effectiveness....<U>
yet I would never advocate to legislate to ban punishment all together</U>, even if it is also harmful to children on the long run. I am saying this, because I want it known that the ban on spanking that I advocate for is all about human rights, not about attempting to force parents into one or another parenting method. In short, I am trying to protect human rights, not to control what parents do, even if there is a link between the two.
singledad said:
And so you confirm my suspicion that you are, in fact, advocating for a law without having giving proper thought to how feasible that law is, or what the possible unintended consequences could be.
I humbly and transparently recognize and admit this. I am no policy maker! Which is okay, since I am in no position to make these policies anyway. And I think you have an excellent point here, that any given law, especially this wide, will have consequences - side effects - that needs to be addressed carefully.
IMO, here is how it compares, singledad - and I realize what I am about to write here is only a comparison, so it is flawed, but please bear with me. When black people were enslaved in America, and people were fighting to ban slavery and declare every human free, this might have resulted in many negative, nasty consequences. I am saying this without any actual verification, but it is <I>
possible</I> that passing a law that bans slavery in America had huge consequences on crime rate: after all, a bunch of angry people who had been enslaved for decades suddenly were free to take revenge and run wild in the street.
Yet I believe it still was the right thing to do. Pass the law, make it right. Make it mandatory to respect human being's fundamental rights. Then, deal with the consequences through new policies, social programs and education.
This is how I see it, IMO. Say that child abuse is actually increased out of this law? Well then - let's find out why, and let's work on it, and pass new measures and education so as to counter this. But let's not use these fears to stop us from doing what's right. Especially since alternatives that are far more effective exists, and have been proven to work a lot better.
singledad said:
Perhaps you will have information discrediting Dr Robert E Larzelere, but I find some of the statistics he quoted, extremely disturbing.
I really do not want to discredit Dr. Larzelere. I am familiar with his line of research, as I have studied his work, as well as the work of Ghershoff and the other few scientists who worked on spanking in the scientific field. And I appreciate that people like him, and like the other scientists, are working hard with long term research to ask the proper questions and nuance each other's work, so we get to a refined and more balanced consensus in the professional field.
On the flip side, I don't believe that a single researcher is enough to know a field. IMO, I like to work from a broad literature review of research, and I like to put each research in its context and taking each researcher's bias into account.
For instance, let's take Sweden.
Researcher agree that these statistics are very difficult to link to spanking. There is a correlation, but not a causality link. The reason is simple: in 25 years, a whole country evolves in so many ways that it becomes very difficult to isolate each variable and determine if these statistics wouldn't have increased ANYWAY, regardless of spanking. For all we know, they might have increased less because of the spanking ban than without - we have no way of knowing this.
Here is an extract from the counter-study from the one you quoted, from Dr. Durrent, on a study that finds the ban on Sweden to be effective and useful, published in the Journal of Child Abuse & Neglect, volume 23, Issue 5, May 1999:
<I>Evaluating the success of sweden’s corporal punishment ban</I> (you might need a subscription to a university library to download the full study):
Durrent said:
Public support for corporal punishment has declined, identification of children at risk has increased, child abuse mortality is rare, prosecution rates have remained steady, and social service intervention has become increasingly supportive and preventive.
Conclusions: The Swedish ban has been highly successful in accomplishing its goals.
None the less, Durant himself explains that:
Durrent said:
It is important to note that direct causal relationships between the passage of the corporal punishment ban and the trends reported here cannot be drawn. Many social changes have occurred in Sweden over the past 25 years, including ongoing legislative reform, demographic shifts, and modifications to social policies. These forces have likely interacted with the attitudinal shifts engendered by the corporal punishment ban to produce the trends reported here.
In the same way, Larzelere's conclusion about Sweden's statistics should be taken very, very carefully.
One hint that this is the case is Finland, where spanking was banned in 1984, and where none of these statistics were found in the 25 years that followed. One would think that if, truly, there was a causality link between the increase in child abuse and the ban on spanking, one would see that trend in all the other countries where it was also banned. And that's not currently the case.
Note that not <I>
every single </I>statistics from Sweden was increasing... only every single statistics that Larzelere chose to report in his study. Many other important indicators did not raise, or went lower; but Larzelere chose not to show them. For instance:
Durrent said:
Reports of assaults against children cannot be assumed to reflect rates of child physical abuse, as they are highly vulnerable to shifts in public awareness and definitions of violence. Child criminal death rates, which have remained at a constantly low rate since 1974, suggest that child physical abuse has not increased in the wake of the corporal punishment ban. In fact, by the late 1980s, the Swedish rate of infant (under 1-year-of-age) homicide was among the lowest in the world; this rate (.009 per 1,000 live births) reflected the criminal death of only one infant between 1985 and 1990 (Belsey, 1993).
Swedish child abuse mortality rates, a more specific indicator of the extent of physical abuse in a nation, are internationally very low; for 15 years, no children died in Sweden as a result of abuse. Recent fluctuations of the rate from zero reflect the death of one child in each of four years between 1990 and 1996. These findings suggest that recent trends in reporting rates reflect increased public awareness of the problem of child abuse, rather than an actual increase in violence.
I can send you the full research if you want, but I can't post it here for copyright reasons. It's very comprehensive.
More things next message!
