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Stardate
20021004.1136 (On Screen): As if I needed another reason to be skeptical about international treaties sponsored by the UN, we find that if you spank your child then you are committing a crime against humanity.
No rational person would defend child abuse. Beating a child until she bleeds or until some of his bones are broken is wrong and should be prevented if possible, or punished. We have laws about that kind of thing, and though enforcement of them leaves a lot to be desired, it is certainly nothing that our society declares to be acceptable.
I assume it's the same way in the UK. They are rumored to be a civilized people, after all. Apparently they're not civilized enough for the UN.
The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, which oversees a 1989 accord protecting youngsters, said it welcomed British legislation abolishing corporal punishment in schools.
But it also called for the repeal of an 1860 law that allows parents to use "reasonable chastisement" to punish their children.
The most obvious question is why the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is spending all its time obsessing on British parents spanking their kids, instead of worrying about how parents in Africa sell thousands of their children into slavery every year. Seems to me we've got yet another example of "searching under the streetlight".
A cop finds a drunk man in a parking lot late at night, searching the ground under the only street light in that parking lot. He asks what they guy is doing, and the drunk replies that he dropped his carkeys and is looking for them. Asked where he was when he dropped the keys, the drunk waves towards a car in the darkness. Asked why he's searching under the street light, he says that if the keys are actually over in the darkness, he'd never find them anyway.
The problem with trying to deal with African child slavery is that even investigating it can get you killed. No matter what else may be wrong with the wicked, uncivilized, barbarian British, they at least don't shoot at representatives of the UN. (Yet.)
But on this issue this UN commission is wrong anyway. Spanking has a place in rearing a child in a technological culture, because when properly used it reduces the deathrate among young children.
When a child is five years old, it's possible to use forms of discipline which don't involve inflicting pain. But when a child is two, they've just learned to walk and learned to run, and they're curious about everything. When they see anything, they want to pick it up. If they can't pick it up, they'll try other things. If they see something interesting, they'll run (never walk) towards it.
There are certain lessons a child that age must learn and learn well:
You do not stick a fork into the electrical outlet.
You do not run across a street filled with traffic.
You do not play with the stove.
These things cannot be dealt with by reasoning with child that age. A two year old doesn't understand concepts like "electrocution" or "confined natural gas explosion" or "scalding hot boiling water" or "being smashed flat by a semi", and no amount of explanation will help. A kid that age isn't yet sufficiently developed to be able to even understand the abstract concept of "danger".
But a two year old definitely understands a swat on the hind end, and if every time that kid starts eyeing the electrical outlet he gets a swat on the hind end, it won't take long before he'll stop doing so, and have a better chance of living to raise his own kids.
Child abuse is a problem, but it's not a problem which should be dealt with through international treaty. What we're seeing is the typical result of establishment of any uncontrolled bureaucracy. The job of a bureaucrat is to regulate, and left to himself he'll eventually try to regulate everything.
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