Over half of the English public say that smacking children should be banned, a new poll has revealed.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) surveyed 3,500 adults to determine support for the scrapping of the defence of “reasonable chastisement”.
The charity’s findings showed that 52 per cent of adults in England believe a ban should be instated, an increase of two per cent from 2023.
Meanwhile, adults who believe smacking, hitting, slapping or shaking a child is unacceptable increased from 67 per cent in 2023, to 71 per cent.
Across the political spectrum, people seemed to be united in their support for believing the practice was deplorable. 83 per cent of Labour voters thought it was unacceptable, with 81 per cent of Lib Dems and 61 per cent of Conservatives agreeing, respectively.
Sir Peter Wanless, NSPCC chief executive, said: “If an adult hits another adult because they don’t approve of how they’re behaving, it’s described as physical assault.
“But if a parent uses physical violence and harms their child by taking the same actions, the law considers it acceptable. This is not right.”
However, campaigners who oppose a change in the law said the results did not widely reflect public opinion.
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Simon Calvert, of the Be Reasonable Campaign, said: “The law protects children from abuse. The reasonable chastisement defence only applies where parents do something reasonable like tap a tot on the back of the hand.”
Last month, a report in the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said that parents should be banned from smacking their children to stop long-term damage.
It said that current laws in England and Northern Ireland are “unjust and dangerously vague”.
The RCPCH said it was a “scandal” that Scotland and Wales had outlawed smacking – as they did in 2020 and 2022 respectively – and the other two home nations had not followed suit.
A loophole in the laws currently allows parents to use physical force against children if it can be justified as “reasonable punishment”.
The report said that children are more likely to suffer from poor mental health when they are smacked, condemning the practice as “a complete violation of children’s rights”.
It added that children who had been hit performed worse in school and were more likely to be physically assaulted or abused.
Professor Andrew Rowland, a consultant paediatrician and RCPCH officer for child protection, said: “The laws around physical punishment as they stand are unjust and dangerously vague.
“They create a grey area in which some forms of physical punishment may be lawful, and some are not.”
