Protecting Childhood: The Urgent Need to Ban Child Beating

The death of Sara Sharif at the hands of the people she should have been trusting was horrific, vile but so avoidable. As outlined in Daniel Sandford’s BBC article there were multiple visits by police as well as numerous run-ins with teachers before she eventually fell through the cracks through the detestable practice of homeschooling, taking away her access to friends, clubs and trained professionals. But perhaps the most egregious example of the state failing this young girl was when Sara’s older sibling, at the age of 4, spoke to teachers, telling them "Daddy hit me." The child, referred to in court as Z, would go on to claim the same about their mother as well as say that they were bitten, pinched and punched by their parents. No action was taken and both Olga Domin and Urfan Sharif continued to roam free. 

Should a woman go into work and tell her boss that her partner hit her, there would rightly be an immediate police case at the hands of the abuser with serious charges against their name. Why, in this case, was the matter disregarded?

For far too long physical abuse against children has been disguised under the veil of punishment and correction. The reality is that the act of physically hurting a child is reprehensible and, for the good of all society, should be illegal. If there had been an adequate law in place when Child Z had reported the abuse to teachers, then Sara’s father and stepmother would both be in jail and a life would have been saved. 

Unprovoked or disproportionate use of physical violence against another individual is not only morally wrong but it's socially unacceptable and outright illegal. Physical violence against a stranger on the street could land you with a 6-month prison sentence and potentially 5 years if the damage is great enough. Domestic abuse carries a similar punishment. One may assume hitting your own child would lead to a worse or similar result, especially when the child is a toddler. But no. In fact, many people praise parents for hitting their child, claiming that they're showing a firm hand and performing their parental responsibility. 

 Previous proposers of legislation around this topic have called for a ban on ‘smacking’. In this article I am and will continue to avoid using the word smacking for one main reason. I am calling for a ban on intentionally hurting a child in any way; smacking waters down the practice and gives the impression that one is talking about whacking a child with the back of a hand. Children across England are being beaten with belts, slippers and fists whilst in the case of Sara the beatings were with cricket bats and metal poles. It's clear that ‘smacking’ is by no means a sufficient word to describe the torturous experience many children endure.

One rather repulsive counterargument I found when researching this article was that hitting a child is permitted because the Bible says so. Now, I for one will never believe anything can be explained through the use of "the Bible says so," but I can see why this may be convincing to many parents of the Christian faith. This is primarily used by conservative Protestants, not all of them, but enough to warrant being challenged. The bible verse in question is taken from Proverbs 13:24, where the eloquently worded verse has been boiled down to the simplistic phrase, "spare the rod, spoil the child." Over time malicious misinterpretation has led many to believe that if a parent doesn't physically punish a child, they will turn out to be a bad person overall. Many religious commentators have even gone as far as to claim that not hitting your own child is doing them a disservice, they claim that you aren't fulfilling your God-given duty of care if you don't take the divine rod and beat your child with it. To briefly shine some light over this, a rod is an item used by shepherds who herd large numbers of sheep. Rods are used for gently ushering the sheep in the way which they should go, not for physical violence. This verse clearly instructs parents to guide children - at no point is violence in any way suggested or encouraged.

Then there is of course the argument that hitting a child is the only way in which discipline can be put into them. To fully ensure that whatever wrong they have done isn’t repeated, a parent has to raise up a physical deterrent. At the trial of Sara Sharif, messages between Sara’s stepmother, Beinash Batool, and her sister, Sara’s step aunt, were released to the public. After Batool revealed that Urfan “beat the crap out of Sara”, the immediate reply wasn’t one of disgust and anger but instead it was “What did she even do?”. Bear in mind, Sara had not yet turned seven years old. Batool told her sister that Sara had hidden some keys to which the response was two eye-rolling emojis and a text reading “why doesn’t Sara learn.” 

The notion that you can beat discipline into a child is remarkably outdated but is still common in the minds of many parents, even in the so-called progressive modern West. Corporal punishment has been banned in schools for over 40 years and is now outlawed in several European Union nations and the majority of South America. The practice is now known to be ineffective in enforcing discipline and puts the wellbeing of our children at risk. If our government were truly serious about ensuring the safety of our young people, then they would at least seriously consider a ban on all forms of corporal punishment against children.