Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I will respond to Amendment 97 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and oppose it. It is over six months since we last debated this issue in Committee in June last year. I welcome the change in tack. A previous version of the amendment sought to abolish the reasonable chastisement defence outright. Amendment 97 is more measured, given the serious implications that such a change in the law would have for parents and children. In England, the only parents who can use the legal defence of reasonable chastisement are those who use reasonable discipline, like a mum tapping a tot on the back of the hand to teach the child not to play with the electrical sockets at Granny’s house. The defence protects parents from being unfairly charged, prosecuted and convicted for smacking their own children, and does so only when no harm was caused and the parent’s behaviour is objectively reasonable. We are not talking about allowing parents to get away with abuse, as Government Ministers have helpfully acknowledged from the Dispatch Box on previous occasions. Under the reasonable chastisement law, if a parent punishes a child in a way that causes anything more than temporary reddening of the skin, that is unreasonable and therefore illegal. Some in the media have exploited horrific cases of children being brutalised to try to bolster their case for outlawing mild parental smacking. I reiterate that abusers are prosecuted under existing law. The tragic cases that we have seen in the press invariably turn out to involve children who were well known to social services but the social workers were invariably overstretched.