Smacking Your Children

You may already know that it is illegal for a teacher to smack your child. But a change in the law will mean that they are able to use 'reasonable force' to restrain children if they are being disruptive, committing a crime, harming someone or damaging something. The changes will also give teachers a new general right to search children on school premises. This is in order to search for anything banned by the school.

Smacking Your Own Child

It is not illegal for a parent to hit their child as long as the ‘smack’ amounts to ‘reasonable punishment’. There is, therefore, a difference between punishment and what can feasibly be termed ‘abuse’. Unreasonable punishment is classed as a smack that leaves a mark on the child, or the use of an implement to hit the child, such as a belt or cane. A parent can give another person consent to use reasonable punishment on their child, such as a babysitter or grandparent.

Criminal Offences

So where do you draw the line between assault – a criminal offence – and reasonable punishment? And what happens if the discipline is seen as Child Cruelty in criminal legal terms? Common assault is chargeable by the Crown Prosecution Service if it amounts to scratches, minor bruising, grazes, red skin, a black eye or superficial cuts.

Actual bodily harm could be a broken or lost tooth, broken nose, minor cuts (more than merely superficial), a loss of consciousness, serious bruising, or minor bone fractures, as well as emotional damage that amounts to a psychiatric injury.

Grievous bodily harm requires a compound fracture, injuries that cause a substantial amount of blood loss (requiring a transfusion), a visual disfigurement, injuries that result in permanent disability, or ‘wounding’ that breaks both the inner and outer layers of the skin. Again, this could include psychiatric injury.

Grievous bodily harm with intent is the most serious (before attempted murder) and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. This would be the right charge if a parent wounded their child with intent, unlawfully, maliciously and intentionally, or caused grievous bodily harm to another person.

Will Smacking Be Banned?

The NSPCC and other children’s charities have been rigorously campaigning for a total ban on smacking. This has not yet come in to force and is unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future. It would also be very hard to enforce within private homes, and reinforces recent government criticism about the ‘nanny state’. Views are divided, but critics of the current law say that it violates the rights of a child not to have recourse to having suffered an assault.