Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to James W,
The law change removed that defense, bringing assault against children into line with assault against adults, or animals.
Your understanding of the law around assaults on animals is mistaken.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Lilith __,
You can make the same argument for any family violence. And it’s true. But should it somehow be legal to assault people you live with or are related to?
It will sometimes be true, and will sometimes not be true. I anticipate that the ratio differs between instances of smacking and other family violence. If you have evidence to confirm or dispute this, I would welcome it.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Miche Campbell,
It is neither safe nor logical to assume a child is more frightened of the police taking their parent(s) away than they are of the parent(s) themselves.
I am not assuming that. I am open to the possibility that it is true for at least some people, in part based on anecdotal evidence.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Chris Waugh,
But, Graeme, once again this is not an academic exercise.
No it's not. I'm talking about actual cases I know of in the criminal justice system where this happened (a child assault case, not a smacking case).
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Russell Brown,
All seven of the parents convicted in the past five years struck their children in the head or face.
Nope. All seven of the parents convicted in the first five years after the law change, at which point police stopped recording. There aren't data on what has happened in the last 18 months.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Craig’s argument is, literally, that NZ’s “anti-smacking law” increases child abuse. That’s a much stronger claim than you’re making, and one that is rightly being pilloried.
It is certainly a different claim. I haven't seen evidence on the position you describe Craig as advancing, but it strikes me as an only probably false, not obviously false.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
By the same argument, shouldn’t minor assault on adults also be legalised on the grounds that a criminal prosecution is unlikely to help the situation for either party?
Mostly, I'm talking about the consequences for the child, of a criminal conviction of a parent who has smacked.
If I get into a minor scuffle in Courtenay Place, the person who I am fighting is not likely to suffer long-term if I have a conviction.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Richard Stewart,
Surely the long term goal is for a change in attitudes about parental violence against children, and this requires having a clear line which shouldn’t be crossed.
The consequences of which can be a criminal charge, including a bail condition that you not associate with your children (who are witnesses) while the trial process is ongoing. Which, if you are a single parent, means their homelife is massively disrupted etc.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
My understanding is that the primary justification for the law change wasn’t to criminalise parents, but was to remove a codified defense that could be (and was) used in cases of genuine child abuse.
That was certainly the justification (or one of the justifications). The law change went further than that, however.
While I haven’t been paying close attention, I don’t think we have any parents now with criminal records for what we’d all generally agree is “a smack”.
I thought maybe one (or two?), although that may have been charges, and then a discharge without conviction. But again, if the intention of the law isn't to criminalise parents who smack, it was an odd choice to pass a law that makes them criminals.
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Does it necessarily follow that thinking smacking is wrong, or potentially (or always) harmful means that the solution is found in the criminal law?
What does the potential imposition of a criminal record for parents like Colin Craig (except in all likelihood, poorer and browner) add that helps this situation?
Many people who were smacked growing up think: my life would have been better if I wasn’t smacked, so I’m not going to smack my children. But who among us thinks: I was smacked growing up, and my life would have turned out better if my mother had been investigated by police for assaulting me, or been charged and convicted for it?
This will sometimes be true, but just because smacking is something we might agree as a society is something there should be less of, why is the criminal law seen as the way to achieve this? And, overall, is using the criminal law as an agent of social change in this way – like we do with many other things, including marijuana use – likely to cause more harm than good in this instance?