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diggWho needs a family when you’ve got a government?
Instead of supporting the family, many governments are usurping its prerogatives
The late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously said, “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nations.” The remarks were made by Trudeau when, as Justice Minister in 1968, he sought to decriminalize homosexual acts and relax Canada’s restrictions on abortion. Forty years later, the Canada Trudeau left behind still seems to believe that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation -- but can make itself very active in its living rooms.Three cases illustrate the current extent of state involvement in attempting to usurp the role of parents. Or put another way, the state attempting to parent parents. Canada’s unelected Senate, a body of political appointees, has passed a bill that elected members of parliament have talked about passing but never have. The Senators want to outlaw the spanking of children. Like most Western nations, Canada already has laws against beating your child, yet spanking or corporal punishment is still allowed under section 43 of the criminal code. Activists have tried to use the courts to have this section of the law overturned, but the Supreme Court upheld the law. In its decision, justices on the court set out guidelines, just so everyone would be clear on what is acceptable and what is not. Punching your child in the face, kicking, beating them about the head, all of these go beyond corporal punishment and into the realm of abuse, while an open hand on the bottom or the torso is properly considered spanking. The Senators want to make it illegal to spank a child under almost any instance. The bill still needs approval from the elected Members of Parliament in the Commons, but the signal has been sent; parents will face the long arm of the law reaching into their living rooms if this bill passes.
Many parents already choose not to spank their children and opt for non-corporal punishments such as time-outs or grounding. Those punishments though, are also subject to state sanction in Canada if current precedent holds. A 12 year-old girl in Gatineau, Quebec, successfully sued her father over being grounded. She was told that she could not attend a three-day class trip because she was outright defiant. It seems the father and daughter were battling it out over a number of house rules. After discovering that his daughter had been having what are only described as “inappropriate” chats at “inappropriate” websites for a 12-year-old, the father told the girl she was not allowed on the internet as punishment. She did so anyway. The father found out his daughter was again having inappropriate chats and also posting inappropriate pictures by using a friend’s computer. This is when the punishment extended not only to banning her from internet use, but also from attending her class trip.
Now there is a complication to this story: the parents involved are divorced and the school required that both parents sign the permission form. Since the girl’s mother was willing to sign the form, she packed up and moved in with Mum. Mum helped her daughter launch the court case in which a judge deemed it too severe a punishment to keep the girl from her class trip. She was allowed to go on court orders.
After telling parents they cannot spank their kids and they must seek state approval for grounding their children, it is scary to see what more could happen. How about taking children away from parents based on their political beliefs? Not possible? It happened in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The local children’s aid society was called in by the school district when teachers noticed markings on a 7-year-old girl. The markings weren’t bruises or burn marks from cigarettes stubbed out on the girl’s arms. They were written markings, like tattoos but instead drawn on the girl’s arms and legs with permanent marker. The markings were various white supremacist phrases and symbols including a swastika. When the girl showed up at school with the markings, Child and Family Services were called, who then called in help from the police to also seize the young girl’s 2-year-old brother. Child and Family Services now claim there is concern about drug and alcohol use in the home, yet their initial reason for seizing the children (the only reason they had when they went to the home to take the 2-year old boy) was the political beliefs of the parents.
White supremacists may be a minority group, and their beliefs may run counter to the accept-everyone-or-you-are-a-racist society we now live in, but is that any reason to take their children away from them? This is a classic case of the slippery slope argument; if a white supremacist’s children can be taken away based simply on their politics, can my children be taken away based on mine? If parents tell their children that global warming is not real would those children be taken away by a Green government? If they tell them that communism will replace capitalism after the worker's revolution, would those children be taken away by a conservative government? This all seems like the state intruding far too much into the lives of individuals and families.
I wish this type of intrusion were restricted to Canada yet the headlines prove otherwise. A German family is now living in England after facing prosecution for home schooling their children, they had faced the prospect of having the children taken away from them for refusing the send their offspring to the state run public school. In California, courts have all but ruled home schooling illegal, for the time being – appeals pending, after ruling that parents need proper teacher certification in order to home school. Parents are each child’s first and primary educator, the state when it plays a part must always be subordinate to the parents not the other way around.
There can be no doubt that the state has an interest in protecting vulnerable children when their parents cannot or will not protect them. Children not being provided with the basic necessities of life, those experiencing sexual abuse, real physical abuse, these children should expect the state to step in and provide the care their parents cannot. When true abuse is absent, the state’s role is to support the family, to help make families stronger, not to usurp the family’s prerogatives and interfere in its life. If as Pierre Trudeau said, the state has no place in my bedroom, why does it insist on sitting in my living room?
Brian Lilley is Ottawa Bureau Chief of Astral Media Radio
Banning physical violence against children is the beginning of granting human rights, protection from assault and of their physical integrity and dignity also to children. Ending parental violence against the most vulnerable, defenseless and powerless human beings is a first, important step to prevent that a child’s brain development can be affected by and damaged through violence. The often life-long consequences of physical attacks for the human body are devastating because these attacks cause terrible fear through the fight and flight response. This response does not only happen in a child’s body when attacked by giant adults, but also in the bodies of adults when they are attacked and hurt by much stronger and taller violent aggressors. When a young brain has been imprinted by violence, these attacks later cause grave problems for the adults’ self-confidence, health and the evolvement of their human potential. Groundbreaking information about how child abuse affects the individual human being and societal society can be found in Alice Miller’s book “For Your Own Good” that can be read for free at nospank.net.
James C. Talbot and Bill Wachob took the words out of my mouth. Children are people, not property (of parents OR of government). They are entitled to rights, too. It is no longer legal to hit even convicts as correction. Children deserve the same protection.
Canada should ban corporal punishment of children because children are vulnerable and
deserve legal protection. There are twenty-three other countries that have banned
corporal punishment successfully. One of them is Norway and I’m Norwegian myself
and Norway has the highest standard of living. Here in the U.S.A., corporal
punishment is still legal and this is a country that is full of violence! NOBODY
deserves to be hit! ESPECIALLY a little child being hit by someone much bigger
than him or her. Think how scary that is! Think of someone twelve feet tall that’s
hitting you as an adult? Spanking children will put fear in them along with
psycological problems as time goes on.
I can also speak for myself how corporal punishment during my childhood affected me in
many ways. It made me anti-social, it made me fear adults, I became severely
depressed which lead to a suicide attempt and affected intimacy in adulthood in my
marriage. The children I babysat for who were spanked where the most aggressive. The
children I babysat for that were NOT spanked was very easy to babysit for. Also,
spanked children can develop strange spanking fetishes.
If you care at all about children, you will make corporal punishment illegal in
Canada.
Spanking is not a right. It is hitting or in other words, asault. Children being provided legal protection from the kinds of assault that all other humans have legal protection from only makes sense. Passing laws that keep children safe from harm is huge progress toward a more peaceful, sensible world.
Six years ago, a Canadian school principal was busted for possessing child pornography. Specifically, he collected pictures of children being spanked. Turns out he’d also spanked a number of students during his career.
In 2002, the FBI broke up a nationwide child-spanking pornography ring. A few of its members even made films using their own kids, who could be heard tearfully pleading their innocence.
Now, it’s not really news that spanking can take on sexual overtones, as anyone who’s seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” can tell you. If you doubt it, just type “spanking” into a search engine and see what kind of results you get. And since there are people out there who are sexually drawn to children, it figures that some would enjoy spanking them.
Tragically for many victims, though, society has mostly failed to recognize the potential for sexual abuse in the practice of spanking children or even young adults. Perpetrators often deflect suspicion simply by playing the discipline card.
It’s high time we woke up to this problem.
Violence toward children is at the base of what is wrong with our society. The age of the human being shouldn’t make any difference in whether or not it is against the law. If it’s assault at 20, it’s assault at 2 - period. It makes no sense at all that the laws do not protect those who are least able to protect themselves. People are not going to change their minds about this until the practice of hitting children is against the law. The majority of Swedes believed in corporal punishment of children before the law banning it was in place. Now it is rare to find someone in Sweden who believes children must be hit in order to teach them anything - because they’ve seen that it is not necessary or beneficial. Their crime rate has fallen as well. There IS a connection.
I also believe there is a connection between how we treat children and how we treat the elderly. When a human being is more dependent on us for basic needs they become targets for abuse.
It is the government’s job to have laws in place to protect ALL of it’s citizens.
Why is it that when people call a violent act....hitting a child....by another name, they seem to think that makes it fine & dandy???? Hitting, no matter who is doing it to whom is an act of violence....NOT discipline. Not to mention, the people doing the hitting are, in many cases, two to three times larger than the child they are hitting. What’s wrong with you people?? If parents are too lazy or uneducated to parent correctly then somebody should most definately step in & help these children!! Violence teaches nothing other than more violence.
Jeanne
Is this really a question of unjust government interference? Should be do away with laws which make it illegal to intentionally cause physical harm to others? Or is it okay to cause physical harm to little people if they “belong” to you but just not to big people who you don’t “own”.
This reminds me of arguments against hazing in fraternities in which people defended it just because it happened to them. Or to use a more extreme example, and perhaps more appropriate, slaveowners having the right to beat their slaves in order to “discipline” them, i.e., to make them do their bidding and prevent incorrect behavior.
I think of it this way, would you do the same thing to an adult? For example, if you didn’t like the way someone you knew acted, would you walk up and hit them on their bottom hard enough to make them hurt? And make no bones about it, spanking is hitting. If we’re talking about love taps, then it isn’t discipline, right? Unless it hurts, it’s not spanking. So does a parent have the right to physically hurt their child? How about shaking? Does a parent have a right to shake their baby? No, because that causes brain damage and possibly death. What does spanking cause? Pain. And perhaps emotional damage and it teaches them that they have the right to hit others (or perhaps only small children).
Effective discipline doesn’t need spanking or other physical punishment. If it appears spanking is necessary, I believe it’s usually because the parent doesn’t know how to apply or exercise effective discipline, which is no reason they ought to have the right to cause pain to their children. Let’s teach effective discipline and get away from causing physical pain for “our” children (would you spank others’ children, probably not, and why not, because they’re not your possessions?). We’re better than that.
“If as Pierre Trudeau said, the state has no place in my bedroom, why does it insist on sitting in my living room?”
Consentual sex is quite a different matter than one being assaulted against their will. I wonder if you would have taken the same position regarding the banning of wives being subjected to corporal punishment? Would you have demanded your rights as head of the household (in your living room)?
Banning corporal punishment of children works. Parents are not put in jail except, as now happens, when children are seriously injured. New Zealand banned all corporal punishment last year and many people were afraid that it would lead to parents being jailed for spanking. That did not happen. A study found there were no prosecutions for “smacking” and “minor acts of physical discipline” against children after six months of the ban. When corporal punishment of children is banned, attitudes toward hitting children changes and child abuse and death from hitting children decreases.
Canada would be joining 24 enlightened countries already banning corporal punishment of children if the House of Commons adopts the Senate legislation.
Teaching children how to become caring and responsible adults without beating them is becoming an international ethic.
Nadine Block,
Columbus, Ohio
Center for Effective Discipline
Regarding hitting children, yes it should be banned. Plenty of Christians like my family don’t hit for “discipline”. See parentinginjesusfootsteps dot org Jesus never said to hit anyone, and he was especially protective of the small and weak. And all the research points to increased anti-social behaviour and crime from spanking children. Spanking is really very perverted, a painful stimulation to the buttocks that is hardly becoming to Christians.
Discipline means to teach, and yes parents should teach their children. This is done by good communication and supervision, setting a good example, and having reasonable expectations based on the age of the child.
Nobody should hit another person, and the law the way it is now is very strange, allowing the hitting of 2-12 year olds only. No other country has this kind of age limit on hitting children, they either ban it completely or not at all. I say join the growing number of countries that ban child-hitting (24 now!) and use your head instead of bullying your children.
The case of the 12-year old being denied a school trip is a separate issue. The mother wanted the girl to go, the father didn’t. The girl was given the option of taking it to court so she did. I admire her spunk - that must have been a great learning experience for her. This became a legal matter to decide which of her parents’ decisions was correct. That’s just how the court works and if you don’t like it then try to change the courts so they can’t decide cases for children when the parents are divorced and disagree. It’s not the girl’s fault her parents divorced and can’t agree on things! The hoopla about this is quite ridiculous because the girl didn’t get to go on the school trip anyway. So calm down.
wow!! i had already read about the grounding case in the paper and that set off major alarm bells for me. When we talk about the separation of powers we should include one more sphere--the family. In the past this was seen as being so obvious as to not be deemed worth mentioning, but it looks lie we need to. To be sure, the girl lived with her mother and her mother wanted her to go, but we can all see that this is setting a VERY worrying precedent. If parents can’t set firm guidelines for their kids then what will become of us?
An excellent summary of recent disturbing events in Canada, Brian. They all represent State overreach, an unjustifiable encroachment into the lives of law-abiding citizens and families. As your segment about white supremacists suggests, the only thing standing in the way of the forced removal of children from families of Christian belief (or any other) is State proscription of those beliefs or association with organizations espousing “hateful beliefs”.
The combination of the Senators’ Bill and the Court decision in Quebec is a potential disaster for parents of all beliefs, creeds and cultures in this nation. Their fusion implies parents cannot punish or discipline their children, regardless of their age or comprehension level, by any effective means. The “rights” of the child have been given precedence over the responsibility of parents to the child. The vast majority of parents I know are absolutely appalled by this judicial and political activism. Where will it end?
I don’t know if you’re a Christian or not, Mr. Lilley, but I can tell you there are grave concerns about religious freedoms in the Christian community. Christ told us things were going to get worse, but I think many Christians had a little trouble believing Canada would become a nation that persecutes its Christian population. Perhaps we aren’t there yet in full force, but the writing is on the wall.
I’d like to think your German example was an isolated case but it is not. I have family in Germany who are homeschooling their children. They were threatened with losing their girls. They now live in Switzerland.
Scary.
As a Canadian civilian female currently living and working in Afghanistan as support staff to our Canadian Forces deployed there, it is gratifying to know that we Canadians still live in a democracy.
Here in Afghanistan it is another story, and we should all be grateful that we DO have the freedoms we do.
However, I am appalled to learn that members of our government have the STUPIDITY to entertain such legislation.
This only demonstrates to me that members of the Senate are so completely out of touch with reality, and while I would like to think they have achieved some good works, this concept of banning the ability of parents to discipline their children is a glowing example that perhaps it is time to abolish the Senate altogether, or at the very least, appoint people whose brains have not atrophied from lack of use and/or common sense.
Parents, citizens: I urge you to NOT sit on the fence on this one, for if you do, what will be next?
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