Europe | French children's rights

A rap on the knuckles

Europe scolds France for allowing corporal punishment. France thinks Europe is throwing a tantrum

IS FRANCE about to be slapped on the wrist for its failure to ban smacking? On March 4th the Council of Europe, the continent’s human-rights body, is expected to reprimand the country for not outlawing the corporal punishment of children. Although attitudes to physical punishment have shifted over the years, there is no taboo in France today against a parent giving a child a firm slap in a public place. The ruling has prompted indignation as well mockery, exposing deep cultural differences over child-rearing.

As a signatory of the European Social Charter, France has to ensure that “domestic law must prohibit and penalise all forms of violence against children”. But the council, ruling in response to a complaint brought by a British charity, is expected to judge that French law is not “sufficiently clear, binding and precise” in doing so. The sticking point is that French jurisprudence allows the “right to discipline” children within the family.

For defenders of this right, a “small slap” has nothing to do with abuse or mistreatment. It can even constitute “a gesture of love”, Thierry Vidor, director of Families of France, a lobby group, told French television. Fully 67% of French parents admit to having given their child une fessée, or a smack on the bottom, according to a TNS-Sofres poll. When Edwige Antier, a paediatrician and politician, tried to introduce a ban on smacking a few years ago, 82% said that they were against the idea.

Up to a point, such views are part of a culture of French child-rearing, where discipline and authority prevail. The firm slap is seen as part of a repertoire of sanctions that distinguishes the unsentimental French approach to parenting from the permissive, child-centric Anglo-Saxon variety. “American parents”, wrote Pamela Druckerman, in “French Children Don’t Throw Food”, a parenting study, “are often deeply ambivalent about being in charge”, while in France “even the most bohemian parents boast about how strict they are”. Ahead of the ruling this week, spanking jokes abounded. Le Monde newspaper ran a front-page cartoon by Plantu, its celebrated illustrator, showing Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel spanking a bare-bottomed Greece.

Yet there is nonetheless a growing French voice urging restraint. Gilles Lazimi, a doctor, has led a campaign against smacking, arguing that it is no more legitimate in a civilised society than violence against women, which has long been outlawed. In 2013, in a landmark case, a French court fined a father 500 euros for smacking his bare-bottomed son, on the grounds of violence against children.

So far, the French Socialist government seems set against criminalisation. Ahead of the council’s ruling this week, Laurence Rossignol, the junior minister for the family, said that there was “no need for a law”, even though she personally was in favour of “education without violence”. The last time this government legislated on a family matter, by legalising gay marriage in 2013, bitter culture wars broke out. Already unpopular in the polls, President François Hollande is likely to want to avoid further cultural division—or anything that smacks of it.

Dig deeper:
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