Barbarism Begins at Home

Jack Staples-Butler

Name:Jack Staples-Butler
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Joined: Jan 2012
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David Lammy MP. Photo by BIS

Lammy is correct in pointing out that, on the whole, parents make far better judges of parenting than politicians, the government, or the state. Generally, Lammy’s words should be heeded.

But on the contentious issue of smacking, and physical punishment generally, extreme caution must be taken with asserting the sovereign liberties of parents. Not to empower the state or assign it the task of instructing parents on child welfare, we must point out key pitfalls of Lammy’s arguments. Perhaps the most obvious is the well-demonstrated fallacy that the use of force engenders non-violent behaviour in children. While it is true that, if conditioned to expect punishment upon disobedience, children may become more compliant with parental authority, revival in this strategy would not produce a sociologically healthy generation of young people. Though compliant and inclined to obey out of fear, a child in expectation of violence will develop a moral compass attuned to this. Physical threats do not equal morally upstanding and ethically considered behaviour, which are entirely separate from obedience.

Really, I have no qualification to be discussing this matter; I have no training in child psychology or behavioural sciences. But neither do the majority of parents and certainly not the majority of supporters of parental smacking. I was particularly roused to respond to David Lammy’s comments because of their historical implications; they seemed to emulate a cycle of calls for stricter authority resulting from outbreaks of chaos and directionless violence – a cycle stretching back thousands of years. The elders of every Roman age longed for the bygone years of their own prime. Their rose-tinted view of life was identical to our own, and of the ages that followed them. But elders forget that in their own youth, their own misdemeanours were met with chastisement from their elders, for all the good it did and did not do them. Every generation complains of the death of discipline, often coupled with the death of the right to instil it. Many elders do proudly speak of being disciplined themselves as children, with the boast that it taught them valuable lessons. But often the line between “corrective punishment” and mere “discipline” is blurred beyond distinction. Furthermore, petty revenge is often inserted into acts of discipline by those fond of using it. In a historical sense, I am not referring only to parents, but to authority figures in general.

The Government has taken a similar attitude to the situation at hand. David Cameron’s insistence that there are parts of society which are “not only broken, but, frankly, sick” may have been essentially correct; but unlike the treatment of sickness, which requires medicine, our Prime Minister has advocated a reaction of ruthless retribution and what amounts to a massive security crackdown. During the riots, the deployment of a huge fleet of heavily armoured black trucks resembled a panel from the Judge Dredd comics. And a parallel with Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is irresistible. The first outbreak of disorder in the novel is not an organised revolutionary campaign, but the chaotic street fighting and looting carried out by apolitical rioters. Pressed to explain why he has ordained such panic on the streets of London, the eponymous V notes:

“Involuntary order breeds dissatisfaction, mother of disorder; parent of the guillotine.”

The rioting following his orchestrations is the result of both wilful design and a collective lashing-out against the norms enforced by authority. Without knowledge of how to respond to oppression constructively, having experienced naught but violent subjugation for many years, the populace strikes against all norms – including those which should require no enforcement, such as “do not smash your neighbour’s windows” and “do not burn down your neighbour’s house”. V’s solution was to steer the subsequent disorder in a political direction; utilising precisely the same tactics that had swept the ruling authority to power. By taking advantage of natural disorder and creating artificial augmentation to it, both tyranny and liberty could overturn an established society. In relation to “discipline” and “order”, the riots in V’s world (a thinly-veiled allusion to the 1981 Toxteth and Brixton Riots which Moore actually witnessed) were evidence that physical punishment did not serve to prevent the eruption of chaos.

We know for historical fact that in 1981, corporal punishment was still widely used in homes and schools. The banning of caning in schools would only come about in 1986 and 1987, and many parents continued to dole out physical punishments without fear of legal until at least 2004. Rioting and disorder has sporadically flared up in every decade. Evidently, it is more serious in some decades than others. Lammy has, in fairness, adamantly stated that tolerance of parental smacking would not alone have prevented the riots; he has argued instead that it must be permitted as a response by parents in a “struggling” situation where children must be set on the straight-and-narrow as a matter of life and death. To steer them away from gangs, drugs and a life of delinquency, they must be put deterred from acting up when young. Though one may see the logic in this, justifying force in this situation represents a wider failure of policy.

For an analogy, it can be said that in the event of major civil unrest brought about by a major disaster, such as nuclear war or the outbreak of biblical plague, the use of firing squads to dispose of looters and troublemakers will probably be sanctioned. Justice could not function as normal in such strained circumstances. In order to keep the peace magistrates may have to be replaced with emergency military courts. Though we may justify the vagaries of this stopgap system, we have already crossed the point of failed planning; if we have reached the stage in which firing squads are necessary, we have failed to prevent the conditions which bring them about. We have a higher responsibility to prevent war and pandemics; likewise, we have a higher responsibility to prevent the conditions that David Lammy describes as precursors to parents believing they must discipline their children with force.