Is it time to ban smacking in England?

Smacking children is a "Victorian-era punishment" that "undoubtedly harms children's health" and must be banned, leading paediatricians have said.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is urging the government to adopt an amendment to its Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill so that parents throughout the UK are no longer allowed to hit their child.

Scotland and Wales are among the 67 countries which have made smacking illegal, in 2020 and 2022 respectively. But in England and Northern Ireland, smacking your child is not illegal if it is a "reasonable" punishment and doesn't cause injuries, such as bruising.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

The murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif by her father and stepmother, who had subjected her to multiple beatings, had already renewed debates about corporal punishment, and smacking in particular.

When the Sharif trial began last October, Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner for England, made "her strongest intervention yet on child safety", said The Guardian. She called for a ban on smacking in Scotland and Wales to be extended to England, as a "necessary step" that could "stop lower-level violence from escalating" in such horrific ways.

It's a topic that divides opinions: 52% of UK adults think it should be legal for parents to smack their children as a form of "reasonable chastisement", as long as it doesn't cause injury, according to a YouGov poll in January. But the percentage of adults who think this has fallen from 63% since 2019.

Among those who remain unconvinced that the government should be given more power to intervene in parenting choices, is Darren Lewis, assistant editor of The Mirror. I am "not a smacking fan", he said, but "a deeper discussion is needed". The health professionals who "arbitrarily" want to enforce a ban often "live in a completely different world, economically and socially, to the mums and dads navigating the trials and tribulations of parenthood".

What next?

The government has said it is "looking closely" at the impact of the changes to the smacking laws in Scotland and Wales, but it has "no plans to legislate on smacking at this stage", said the BBC.

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has just completed its committee state in Parliament, represents "the single biggest piece of child protection legislation in a generation", a government spokesperson said.