[quote]
A French tourist has been charged with assault for smacking his child outside an Edinburgh restaurant.
Sylvian Boquelet says he smacked his eight-year-old son across the bottom after the youngster had a temper tantrum during a meal.
I’m all for legislation preventing violence towards children. I don’t support corporal punishment, and I’m leery towards any smacking of children. On the other hand, I don’t believe it is a constructive decision to ban any and all smacking. A smack on the arse is unlikely to permanently hurt this child or psychologically scar him (I’m willing to be corrected here).
As the Conservatives have said, this hardly does wonders for Scotland’s image. Don’t these legislators have anything more useful to do?
I think the question here is whether or not the law makes any sense. IMHO, it doesn’t. It’s absurd to ban any form of corporal punishment while at the same time not prosecuting parents for forcible confinement when they ground their kids. Should we charge a mother with assault every time she picks her kid up without asking? If a four-year-old says “I wanna stay!” and the parents hauls them off to the car, is that kidnapping? Children are not afforded an absolute right to security of the person from their parents, never have been, and never will be. A total ban on corporal punishment is hypocritical, senseless, and serves no purpose except to make busybodies feel good about themselves.
It also seems like if you are a country where tourism makes up an appriciable part of your economy, you ought to inform people of laws that are as radical as this: I mean, it is of course a tourist’s duty to learn the laws of whatever country they are visiting, but if your goal is to prevent the offense, it seems reasonable and plote to remind people of unusual/unexpected laws, especially laws that are likely to apply to them and which are actively enforced.
Well, hey, at least we managed to be right about something…
And, yeah, it seems like a pretty stupid law, probably based on some raving nutcase somewhere who, at the grand old age of six, got a spanking once and then swore that, one day, he’d make it against the law to apply punishment to children.
Oops, let me clarify a couple of things. I mean Conservatives with a big ‘C’ – i.e. the Conservative Party, not conservatives in general. Ian Duncan Smith’s lot give you guys a bad name!
matt_mcl: I didn’t mean to suggest that the law be ignored, but that this law was a waste of space in a parliament with a limited legislative timetable. It seems to be forbidding something that is arguably largely undetectable, more arguably not inherently a bad thing, and, as RickJay says, pretty hard to define and enforce.
A sign at the border saying Ye a’ nae allooed to assault or batter wee bairns in Sco’land. Nae even if ya pumped the load or squeezed oot the pup yasel’ should do it.