England has become the only nation in Britain to allow parents to smack their child, as a law that bans physical punishment takes effect in Wales today.
Any type of corporal punishment, including smacking, hitting, slapping and shaking will be illegal in the country. The law will give children the same protection from assault as adults and will even apply to visitors to Wales.
Parents, or anyone who is responsible for a child, can face criminal charges if they are found to have physically disciplined a young person in any way. It means parents could be charged with offences such as actual bodily harm, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Wales joins Scotland, which introduced its own ban in November 2020, and more than 60 other nations in legislating against the physical punishment of children.
Westminster has no plans to bring in a similar ban in England. The government believes that it would wrongly criminalise parents and says that existing laws prevent and punish parents who are violent towards their children.
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Smacking a child in England and Northern Ireland will remain permitted as long as it constitutes “reasonable punishment”.
Tim Loughton, a senior Conservative MP and former children’s minister, accused Wales of “pandering to the lobby that thinks the state knows better than the parents about how best to bring up their children”.
“I don’t support criminalising parents for smacking their children and too often in the past it has been a knee-jerk response for those who think that there is a direct link with child cruelty, which there isn’t,” he added.
More than two thirds of adults in England believe it is wrong for parents or carers to physically punish their child. A YouGov poll of nearly 3,000 adults, commissioned by the NSPCC, Britain’s biggest children’s charity, found that 68 per cent said they felt that physically disciplining a child was unacceptable.
The polling revealed a lack of clarity about the law on physical punishment, with 58 per cent thinking it was illegal to smack your child, while only 20 per cent knew it was still legal, while 22 per cent did not know either way.
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The NSPCC said that last year more than 500 counselling sessions had been conducted by Childline, where children and young people reported being smacked or hit by parents and carers. The punishment became more severe as they got older, the research found.
One unnamed 16-year-old girl told Childline: “When I was younger and I misbehaved, my mum gave me a warning and put me on the naughty step. Then when I got to around 5 to 12 years old, it was a tap or a little smack.
“But now it can be a proper smack or there was one occasion where she pulled my hair and I fell to the floor and she continuously hit me. I don’t want to get Mum in trouble, but I can’t carry on being afraid of her.”
Mark Drakeford, the first minister of Wales, hailed the change in the law and said: “The United Nations convention on the rights of the child makes it clear that children have the right to be protected from harm and from being hurt and this includes physical punishment. That right is now enshrined in Welsh law. No more grey areas.”
