New data prompts call to abolish Australia’s ‘ancient’ smacking laws

National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds has called for smacking to be made illegal as data shows children who have seen and experienced physical abuse are more than nine times more likely to use violence in the home.

Her comments came in response to new research that showed children who are smacked are more likely to use violence against their family, mainly their siblings and mothers, in adolescence. Other recent research has shown smacked children face increased risk of mental health conditions or self-harm.

One in five of 5021 young people (aged 16 to 20) surveyed by the national women’s safety research body, ANROWS, said they had used violence against a family member. Of those, 89 per cent had experienced abuse, including smacking.

Australia’s Children’s Commissioner, Anne Hollonds has called for laws permitting the smacking of children to be repealed.

In March, Wales became the 64th country to ban smacking or slapping children, repealing Victorian-era laws permitting “reasonable punishment”, after a two decades-long anti-smacking campaign.

Similar century-old laws permitting reasonable physical punishment of children still exist in Australia, but Hollonds says they must be repealed to protect children and also reduce Australia’s “pandemic of family violence”.

“A lot of people would be amazed [that smacking is still legal] … we’ve come a long way in terms of awareness that domestic violence is a crime, which really highlights how out of step we are with legislation when it comes to children,” she said.

Anne Hollonds says ancient laws permitting smacking of children must be repealed as they have been in 64 countries.Credit:Peter Rae

“We know now that you can’t hit your boss, your wife or even hit your dog, but at home you can use physical punishment on your own kids. These ancient laws allow for ‘reasonable chastisement’ but only NSW even has a definition of what that is [children can only be hit below the neck].″⁣

In Victorian law it is not illegal to smack children but it is illegal to, with extreme force, hit, punch, slap, kick, shake, bite, strangle, throw or burn a child, or hit the head or neck of a child in a harmful way.

Professor Silke Meyer, a co-author of the ANROWS study Adolescent family violence in Australia: A national study of prevalence, history of childhood victimisation and impacts said young people who had been smacked as children told researchers “they tend to hit family members, especially siblings and mothers, as a way of conflict resolution”.

“We had a few young people comment specifically on it: ‘I was smacked as a child, that taught me this kind of behaviour was OK’. It’s a lot around role-modelling,” said Meyer, the Leneen Forde Chair of Child and Family Research, Griffith University.

‘We know now that you can’t hit your boss, your wife or even hit your dog, but at home you can use physical punishment on your own kids.’

The research is the first in Australia or internationally to examine the nature of and responses to adolescent family violence from the perspective of young people.

Meyer disputed the common idea that “I was smacked as a child and I turned out OK”.

“Very often men in behaviour-change programs for intimate partner violence will say, ‘My dad smacked us and I turned out to be OK, aside from the use of abusive behaviour’. Otherwise, they think, ‘It didn’t hurt me so it doesn’t hurt my children’,” she said.

Professor Daryl Higgins, chief investigator on the first national study of child abuse and neglect in Australia, said the prevalence of smacking in Australian households was still “massive”.

Preliminary data from his longitudinal study into child maltreatment showed 61 per cent of Australian young people now aged 16-24 had experienced four or more instances of physical punishment in their childhoods.

“It’s massive, not a freak event at the sidelines of parenting; these are young people whose childhoods who have been experienced very, very recently,” said Higgins, director of the Institute of Child Protection Studies at Australian Catholic University.

His data suggests having had more than four episodes of smacking elevates the risk of serious mental health issues in young people.

“We’ve looked at associations [between corporal punishment] with major depression and generalised anxiety disorder and it’s roughly double the risk of those mental health condition. In the first six years post-childhood it almost doubles the risk of anxiety and depression.”

A promising finding was that people aged under 65 were less likely to believe it was necessary to engage in smacking as punishment. While almost 38 per cent of 65+ Australians said corporal punishment was necessary, this dropped to about 30 per cent of those aged between 35 and 64 and 18.9 per cent of 25 to 35-year-olds.

Victoria’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, Liana Buchanan, said the commission’s 2019 Lost, Not Forgotten report into 35 children who died by suicide showed “family violence was a factor in nearly every case”.

“Yet children remain under-acknowledged as victims of family violence in their own right,” said Buchanan.

“This research will help to change that, but findings without government action will not deliver to children the care and interventions they so urgently need – we can prevent abuse, support victim-survivors, and turn children away from the risk of themselves becoming perpetrators. But we must act.”

Tamara Cavernett, president of the Australian Psychological Society, said the evidence that smacking is psychologically harmful is “unequivocal”.

“It worsens the relationship between parent and child and normalises violence. It can also teach children that violence is OK when there is disagreement or when you want someone to behave in a certain way,” she said, calling for parents to have more access to psychological support services.

“Physical discipline can work momentarily to stop problematic behaviour because children are afraid of being hit. It doesn’t work in the long term and can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behaviour, physical injury and mental health problems for children that continue into their adult life.”

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