Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS: Try Not To Be a Child in Britain

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 14 2005 (IPS) - Britain is about the worst place to be a child in Europe, it emerged from a report on the rights of children across Europe.

”Despite their size and fragility, the UK’s 13 million babies and children have less protection under assault than adults,” says the ‘Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance’ based in Britain.

The alliance has launched a campaign to protect British children after a report on children rights by the European Committee on Social Rights. This committee of the Council of Europe seeks to judge conformity of national law and practice with the European Social Charter of the Council of Europe, a grouping of 46 European nations that includes the European Union and the 21 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries.

The report says that only 16 of these 46 European countries have made hitting children as unlawful as hitting anyone else. Responding to complaints brought against five countries, the committee found Ireland, Greece and Belgium in breach of their human rights obligations under the charter. In Italy and Portugal it found supreme court rulings that prohibit all corporal punishment.

There were no complaints against Britain ”because it is not signed up to the complaints procedure,” the committee report says. ”However, the UK is a party to the European Social Charter and is being pursued by the Committee of Social Rights to satisfy its human rights obligations.”

The law across most of Britain is in contradiction with those commitments. Of the four regions of Britain, in England and Wales he Children Act 2004 allows children to be hit as ”reasonable punishment”. In Scotland the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows for the ”justifiable assault” of children. In Northern Ireland the law allows for ”reasonable chastisement.”

A major study carried out for the Department of Health in 1997 found that 91 percent of children had been hit. In families where both parents were interviewed, almost half the children were hit weekly or more often; one in five of the children had been hit with an implement and more than one third (35 per cent) had been punished ”severely”.

Three-quarters of mothers stated that they had already ”smacked” their babies before their first birthday, and 14 percent of one year-olds had been hit with ”moderate” severity; 38 percent of four year-olds had been ”smacked” more than once a week.

But statistics could paint a poor picture of Britain partly because many other European countries have not studied the practice as thoroughly as some British groups have.

”There is no culture free from this,” alliance spokesperson Rachel Hodgkin told IPS. ”But in the Scandinavian countries there has been a ban for a very long time, and compared to children in Scandinavia British children are certainly more at risk.”

In Britain one or two children die every week ”at the hands of their parents,” Hodgkin said. ”In Sweden often a year goes by without a single such case.”

It is inevitable that the law in Britain will change even though the last children’s act was passed only last year, Hodgkin said. ”The present law was not supported by professional groups or human rights campaigners,” she said. ”The law will stay on the statute books a year or two, and then bow to the inevitable.”

The latest Council of Europe move follows two recommendations to the British government by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (1995, 2002), for clear legislation to give children equal protection under assault laws.

The British parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has several times urged the British government to take the same step, most recently in October 2004. More than 400 organisations have signed up to the ‘Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance’.

The alliance believes that the human rights pressure is now so strong that modernising the law on assault to give children equal protection must be on the parliament agenda this year.

Of the countries formally found at fault, Greece has indicated it will legislate to comply with the latest Council of Europe ruling, and Belgium and Ireland are expected to act on the committee’s decision soon. The committee’s rulings are the result of complaints submitted in 2003 by the World Organisation Against Torture, which made the case that the law in these countries failed to protect children from corporal punishment and other humiliating treatment or punishment.

”Affording children the protection from the law on assault that we take for granted ourselves is a fundamental international human rights standard that we cannot ignore any longer,” Sir William Utting, spokesperson for the alliance said in a statement. ”If the UK were signed up to this complaints procedure, there is no doubt that we too would be judged in breach of our human rights obligations by failing to give children equal protection.”

Eric Sottas, Director of the World Organisation Against Torture, said: ”We welcome these ground-breaking decisions which should speed up moves to give children throughout Europe the same right to protection from being hit or humiliated as adults enjoy. They put Europe on the fast- track to becoming a corporal punishment free zone where children’s human right to equal protection is respected.”

Only a small number of European countries have signed up to the Social Charter complaints procedure used against Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal. But all states which have accepted the Social Charter have to submit regular progress reports to the Committee of Social Rights.

Law reform to prohibit corporal punishment of children in the family began in Sweden in 1957, when a criminal law provision excusing parents who caused minor injuries to their children in the course of punishment was repealed. In 1979 Sweden became the first state to explicitly prohibit corporal punishment and other humiliating treatment of children, in its Parenthood and Guardianship Code.

To date, 14 European states have introduced explicit abolition: Sweden (1979), Finland (1983), Norway (1987), Austria (1989), Cyprus (1994), Denmark (1997), Latvia (1998), Croatia (1999), Bulgaria (2000), Germany (2000), Iceland (2003), Hungary (2004), Romania (2004), and Ukraine (2004).

In Italy, in 1996 the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome declared that all corporal punishment was unlawful and Portugal’s Supreme Court issued a similar judgment in 1994. Neither has confirmed these decisions explicitly in legislation, but the court decisions are expected to be observed as law.