Confronting the issue of corporal punishment is often difficult because it is so personal, a conference on violence against children heard on Wednesday.
London-based Peter Newell, of the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, was addressing the East and Southern African regional preparatory consultation in Benoni, ahead of a United Nations study on violence against children.
”Most parents were hit as children and have also hit their children, and we don’t like to think badly of our parents and our parenting,” he told the South African Press Association on Wednesday.
”That makes it very difficult to see the issue in terms of equality and human rights.”
He stressed that hitting children has ”nothing to do with discipline”.
”It is a lesson in bad behaviour. It makes things worse, not better.”
Newell further challenged Christian fundamentalists who defend corporal punishment as a parental duty.
”Christians who apply the words of Proverbs 9:10, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, and the shorthand version of Proverbs 13:24, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’, are suggesting that small, fragile children are deserving of such punishment and that the deliberate infliction of fear and pain is a necessary part of the childhood experience.
”Positive, non-violent parenting best models Christ’s teachings.”
Newell asked: ”Why should children have to wait for protection [such as laws against violence on women] that all people take for granted?
”Nobody says, ‘Stop all violence against women only when all men have jobs and have been on anger-management courses.”’
Recommended alternatives to corporal punishment are positive forms of discipline intended to teach, rather than things that are hurtful and negative.
Workshops at the meeting adopted recommendations that corporal punishment should be banned in all settings and in all 22 countries of East and Southern Africa.
The study on violence against children will be produced over two years and presented to the UN General Assembly in 2006. — Sapa