Smacking Law

Opinion

At last New Zealand has turned an important corner.

The law change will result in some impact as people will think twice and that time taken thinking will remove much reactive smacking from the picture.

Reactive smacking is more likely to be unjust and disproportional. Parents need better tools than showing their children that violence or chaos is the way to affect people.

Like earlier social law reforms the reduction of the acceptance of violence in general is a slow intergenerational process.

That this law can no longer be an issue, as National voted for it unanimously, brings New Zealand up a few notches on the international ladder of quality of life for our children.

The new law removes the defense of "reasonable force" in the discipling of children in cases of abuse. A smart intervention by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition brought together a massive landslide for the vote on this issue with every member of the National opposition voting for the bill. The amendment does not change the nature of the change, it does not legitimise smacking or seek to define behaviours but states that police should not investigate every inconsequential complaint about a smacking that children may bring in retaliation. Parents who are successfully bringing up their families are an outcome that pushes any smacking into a gray area where the police are very likely to overlook it. However, in a fully dysfunctional war where parents seek to control their children with violence, and people risk getting badly hurt, these may now be prosecuted. Is Simon Barnett (used to be a TV personae, now a parent advocating freedom to smack children) now worried about his freedoms that he has admitted smacking his children on the TV debate? If he is not arrested then perhaps parents have little to fear from the law change. But he should now carefully read and accept the new laws that now govern the limits of his behaviour toward other human beings, even if he considers them his private property.