THE final WORD

THE final WORD : Why even the mildest violence against our children can leave a mental scar that never goes

Saturday July 1st 2006

Flowers decorate the storm drain where two dead little girls were found this week in Belgium. Stacy and Nathalie, half-sisters aged 10 and seven, had been abducted and murdered soon afterwards, while their adult carers sat drinking in a bar.

The Belgian royals broke off their holiday to acknowledge the shock felt in a community still haunted by the actions of Marc Dutroux.

This was a story you wouldn't want to read unless you had to. Too much suffering, too little joy.

Yet as the ISPCC rolled out a 10-point plan to better serve and protect Irish children, Belgium offered a salutary lesson. Outrage after the Dutroux scandal hadn't really changed the culture. All the talk hadn't saved two neglected girls.

Anyone looking afresh at the status of children in Ireland is genuinely surprised by how low it is, at the level of those levers that make or break change. On the surface, children look like they're at risk of getting too much, with occasional tragic exceptions such as the statutory rape fall-out which don't speak to what Irish people are really about.

Deeper down, the situation goes into reverse. While children in general are loved and celebrated, their actual official status resembles the status of women before the 1960s.

Like members of an immigrant community, children live a grace and favour existence, whose lack of legal foundation is exposed solely when things go wrong. Incidentally, this explains partly why there are more golf courses than playgrounds and why issues of everyday childcare don't get taken seriously enough.

Constitutional change is the ISPCC's priority. If adults voted in favour of changing some of the articles on Family, state agencies and case law could be mobilised to generate better child protection and resources.

But does the culture lag behind the theory? For adults, point 10 on the ISPCC list is the litmus test of how we feel in practice about the actual status of children - physical punishment.

Do you smack your child? Adults who were smacked as children see it as unfair or ineffective, or else say it did them no harm in the long run. But children don't agree. Fewer than three in every 20 children think it's OK for adults to hit them. They feel humiliated and deeply aggrieved.

Children use the following words to talk about being hit: hurt, sad, sore, upset, unhappy, unloved, heartbroken, awful.

Kids in Northern Ireland said that smacking makes them sore outside and inside. Those 'inside' feelings intensify as they grow older, with some coming to that believe their parents don't really love them deep down.

"I wouldn't hit them because you wouldn't set a good example taking out your anger," a nine-year old girl said, "and if you had a bad day at work and they just got on your nerves, you should just walk away and not hit them and play fair."

Parents forget that although they may know the level of physical punishment beyond which they won't go, children don't. In the child's eyes, the 'good' parent who gives him a swipe may be much more forceful next time round.

The parent knows she is not going to bite the child's ear off or throw him against a wall; the child who is hurt by the person he loves most has no context in which to reach the same conclusion.

Policy, or rather non-policy, on smacking children in Ireland has evolved on the basis of what adults say, with the 'it did me no harm' rationale winning out against children's own reports of feeling assaulted. But adults who deny the impact of having been smacked suffer from two modes of denial.

First is using hindsight. Second is the need to hold in your heart an image of your own parent as good, loving and true.

To admit your parents hurt you might be seen as disloyal or acknowledging they were less than you needed them to be.

The rising trend of serious assaults against children may make the debate about smacking seem lightweight. Why worry, when worse is happening every day?

But pro-child researchers summon mountains of evidence to link even the simplest forms of physical punishment with child behaviour and development. Aggression at home connects to aggression outside.

Although pro-smacking campaigners insist there is nothing wrong with a slap as a last resort - a view promoted by Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church, too - an otherwise caring parent may be teaching their child a negative way of resolving a situation fast. And whatever about the long-term, the effects of smacking reach outside the family almost as soon as smacking starts.

Other people's smacking behaviour puts you and your children at greater risk. Even in kindergarten, children whose mothers smack them attack other children twice as often as the children of mothers who don't. Those whose mothers use harsher physical punishment attack other children four times as frequently.

Teenage boys whose parents smack them are more likely to hit their parents in later life, while boys who endure regular physical chastisement are much more likely to hit their girlfriends later on.

And increasing numbers of girls are hitting back.

The debate about smacking isn't really about parents' rights to chastise their children physically. Like passive smoking, it's also about how their decisions go on to hurt everyone else.

? Irish Independent