"A Blueprint for National Disaster"

A critique of the Report of the Commission on Children and Violence (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 1995) by Fred Naylor

This report by the self-styled Gulbenkian 'Commission' was hammered by the Press when it was published last November. It would be a great mistake, however, to regard its chief weakness as being "going a little over the top" by condemning the smacking of young children. The report is flawed throughout and is a blueprint for national disaster.

Causes of violence

Few would dissent from the Report's argument that children who experience violence or abuse are more likely to inflict it on their own children later. It is equally almost certainly true that children who are punished by their parents are more likely to punish their own children, but this does not constitute an argument either for or against punishment. Violence implies strong force and cannot be equated with punishment.

The public is more concerned with the rise in violence over the last 50 years. Senior citizens live in fear of going out; women are afraid to venture out alone and public places are becoming increasingly unsafe for children. But this is hardly addressed at all by the Commission. Even a body interested simply in the cause of violence could not hope to succeed if it failed to examine changes in the levels of violence over periods of time.

On the odd occasion when the Commission considered changes over time, it got it hopelessly wrong. For example, it suggested (p56-7) that inequalities of income and unemployment had both increased and might be factors in creating violence. This is a common belief but it is contradicted by the findings of Rutter and Smith in their authoritative Psychosocial Disorders in Young People, 1995 which the authors of the Report chose to ignore:

It is immediately apparent that these [trends in unemployment]...do not fit the crime trends at all (p470).

Contrary to expectations, therefore, it seems that at the national level high crime rates are associated with wealth, economic growth and more even distribution of incomes (p464).

The Children & Violence Report repeatedly quotes the 'findings' of similar 'commissions' in other countries, without any indication of there being any evidence to support them. No doubt this Commission's 'findings' will be similarly quoted by like-minded bodies in other countries. The merry-go-round of cross-quotation on an international scale will be given another twirl.

Punishment

The Report argues that if children experience physical force they will assume that society approves of it and will feel at liberty to apply physical force themselves. Therefore physical force must be eschewed. But this argument ignores the conjunction of the applied physical force with the event which provokes it. If the argument were sound it would apply equally to mental force, such as withdrawal of love or other mental stress. Since punishment is defined as the application of suffering (physical or mental) in order to change attitudes or behaviour, the main argument of the Report strikes at all forms of punishment.

If the argument against punishment in all its forms were to be widely accepted it would completely undermine the law, which seeks to protect the weak. For its successful operation the law depends entirely on applying sanctions against law-breakers. Such sanctions, by definition, involve punishment. If there were no punishment we would quickly become a lawless society.

At the Report's launch, the most frightening contribution came from Commission member Alan Levy QC, who claimed that some of our laws are promoting violence and proposed the revolutionary notion that the purpose of Criminal Justice should be rehabilitation only, with no place at all for retribution.

Traditionally it has been argued that punishment serves a threefold purpose: deterrence, retribution and reform. The length of custodial sentence served by a criminal, for example, is primarily related to these three considerations. It will hopefully bring a sense of shame. Unfortunately a sense of shame is disappearing in this country and reform is being confused with rehabilitation.

Children's Rights

The Commission cites Article 19.1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in support of its contention that physical correction should be outlawed:

States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.

Only on a perverse definition of violence could this Article be taken to mean that a person could not apply reasonable chastisement. Mr Levy drew special attention to the requirement in our common law to avoid the infliction of 'unnecessary suffering'. He argued, in my view correctly, that this implied that the law sanctioned necessary suffering (an integral part of punishment). Necessary suffering and punishment may be evils as far as Mr Levy is concerned and he is entitled to his view, but he is not entitled to foist it upon the public as an article of the UN Convention.

There is real concern that liberal do-gooders will increase their influence at the UN and modify the Convention in a way that will satisfy such as Mr Levy. Many US lawyers have recently drawn attention to the way in which the UN Charter has already shifted the emphasis away from 'protection rights' to 'choice rights' for children.

True, the 'choice rights' - freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of thought, conscience, religion etc - are not yet absolute. Such rights have to be exercised under the guidance of parents and can be limited by law in the wider interests of society. But in the developing field of children's rights the balance has definitely shifted away from adults and towards children. In societies such as our own, where children already have much greater protection and indeed choice rights than those living in harsher conditions, the shifting balance is causing alarm.

It is a constant theme of the Commission's Report that social workers should increasingly act as substitute parents and provide a blueprint for good parenting. Parents' duties and responsibilities were also to be challenged by providing counselling for children in schools, on sexual and other personal matters, without their parents' knowledge.

The sidelining of morality

The Report introduces the subject of morality with the statement: "Available research disproves the still-popular theory of the original badness of children" (p32). It further observes that:

While the rate of homicide in the USA is very much greater than in the UK, it is not helpful to think there are many times more evil people in the USA than in the UK. Instead, those concerned with the problem should be looking at such issues as relative social deprivation, discrimination and access to firearms. (p32)

If all people are born with the same propensities towards good and evil then the differences between the two countries could be explained in terms of their different approaches to moral education. Such a difference exists. The USA uses 'values clarification', which condemns attempts by adults to pass on their values to children. The UK is increasingly following the same path. Violence rose in the USA with the introduction of 'values clarification'. It has been rising here too as traditional moral education has come under attack.

The authors of the Report dismissed morality almost from the start:

In considering violence and how to reduce it, a concentration on moral judgments is unlikely to be helpful, acting as a distraction from issues amenable to change. (p32)

Thereafter no further reference is made to morality and thereby any possibility that the increase in violence might be due to a decline in moral standards is completely ignored.

Conclusion

The Commission which produced the Children & Violence Report reflects a strong do-gooding culture which poses a serious threat to society. The members of the Commission, either individually or through the organisations they represented, were sustained by a simple unshakeable prejudice - viz. that punishment of any kind is unacceptable. This prejudice informed their handling of the evidence, their presentation of the argument and their final conclusions.

If their recommendations were acted upon, society would be assisting in its own demise. No society can contemplate the dismantling of the judicial system which relies entirely upon the imposition of penalties of one form or another (ie punishment). If children are to be brought up to believe that all forms of punishment are despicable, they are not being prepared for the real world, but for a world that exists only in the minds of the Utopians.

Fred Naylor, formerly a secondary school headmaster currently works as an educational consultant.

This article was originally published in the Families for Discipline newsletter, Issue 4, Spring/Summer 1996.

Editorial comment

There was nothing surprising about the call for a ban on all physical discipline of children by the self-appointed 'Commission' on Children and Violence last November. Given the composition of the group such a demand was entirely predictable.

No less than twelve of the seventeen members of the Commission are associated with EPOCH (End Physical Punishment of Children), either as personal sponsors or as senior officers in organisations who have publicly identified themselves with the campaign to end "all physical punishment by education and legal reform." The Commission's research co-ordinator was none other than EPOCH co-ordinator Peter Newell and the entire project was sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which has contributed over £60,000 to EPOCH's associated charity since its inception in 1990.

Sir William Utting, who chaired the Commission assured us that he was entirely independent and had no formal association with EPOCH when we raised the question of his involvement on the day the Report was published. Nevertheless his name appears on a list of EPOCH's individual sponsors dated October 1993 - just a month before the Commission on Children and Violence was convened.

As the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, wrote in a national newspaper: "The use of loaded, emotive phrases such as 'hitting people' and 'violence' reveals the biased agenda of the Commission... There was not one person on the Commission serving as an ordinary concerned parent, the sort who knows in their bones that a smack is not a perverse act of hatred or brutality but a way of forcing a disruptive child to get a grip before it is too late."

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