Source: www.theage.com.au
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, December 5, 2009: Smacking children should be made illegal throughout the world, a British child rights activist told the Parliament of the World’s Religions yesterday. Christine Dodd said corporal punishment infringed children’s rights and dignity, taught them that violence was a proper way to solve conflict and was on the same continuum as serious abuse.
Ms Dodd, co-ordinator of the Churches Network for Non-Violence, said that so far, 25 nations had made all corporal punishment illegal, 24 had committed to do so, and another 146 had prohibited it in schools and penal institutions. Even so, only 3 per cent of the world’s children were legally protected from such violence in all settings.
“Children … enjoy human rights like the rest of us, and they do not stop at the family door. Society is moving on from seeing children as the property of parents. There are much better ways of disciplining children.” Ms Dodd said; according to her corporal punishment was often based on misinterpretations of sacred texts, and that British missionaries were responsible for much corporal punishment around the world.
Her network worked with religious groups by showing them that punishing and humiliating children did not fit their core religious values.
Stephen Hanmer, an American UNICEF worker, said religious groups were ideally placed to stop family violence because they had moral authority to change mindsets and their networks reached from small villages to large cities.