8. Debate: Stage 4 of the Children (Abolition of the Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:53 pm on 28 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Reckless Mark Reckless Conservative 6:53, 28 January 2020

This debate should be about more than whether it is morally right to smack a child or whether it is good parenting ever to use physical chastisement. If it were just about that, then my view is that it is not and, for my own children, I have not smacked them and I hope to bring them up without ever physically chastising them. But that is not sufficient, that view, to vote for this legislation because there is a further step: is it right to go from one's own personal moral view about this to saying, 'That is a view that we shall use our powers here to impose on the rest of society'? I'm not convinced that we're at this point. The Deputy Minister rightly spoke about social norms, and I wouldn't want to put any emphasis on any particular poll or any particular survey, but I'm concerned that those changes in society—smacking and corporal punishment, certainly as we used to see, are not the social norms they were. But I fear that there are still too many people, too large a group of parents who take a different view of this to that which I personally take. And for that reason, I think this should remain, for now at least, an issue determined by parents, within marriages, within relationships, within families. I say that from a pragmatic more than a principled view. There may come a time when the changes in social norms are such that it may be appropriate to legislate, that something becomes so transgressive of social norms that there is legislation and there is criminalisation, but I don't believe that that time is yet, simply because there are too many loving families who still use physical chastisement because their views on the matter are different from mine. And I—