Section 59
Today’s Herald on Sunday has an excellent editorial on Sue B’s Section 59 Bill. It reads, in part:
To call it the “anti-smacking” bill is a serious - and, one suspects, mischievous - misrepresentation. The bill if passed would not outlaw corporal parental discipline, but rather remove a section of the Crimes Act that all0ws parents to defend a charge of assault on the grounds they were “justified in using force by way of correction towards the child, if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances.”
Some - too many - of the proposal’s detractors see in this the creeping hand of state interference with the child-reading rights of parents. The bill seeks to remove the protection enjoyed by a North Otago woman who was found not guilty in May of assaulting her son despite admitting she hit him with a horse whip and a bamboo cane and the Hamilton man who was acquitted in 2003 after using a rubber hose to beat his daughter.
National’s social services spokeswoman Judith Collins is not alone in describing the bill as a “blunt instrument” which will criminalise loving parents along with abusive ones. But our hard-pressed police are hardly like to devote resources to arresting an occasional non-abusive disciplinarian. Stop and think: it’s illegal to make a copy of a CD even if you own it, but the cops aren’t bashing down the doors of individuals burning a disc to play in the car.
It’s to be hoped that consideration by a select committee will get to grips better than talkback callers have with the real issue: the bill is about protecting children, not attacking parents. Anyone who thinks that’s not worth exploring needs to readjust their priorities.
Hear, hear.
July 3rd, 2005 at 6:14 pm
My reading of the editorial is that it will indeed make smacking illegal, but that people should not worry as the Police will not bother to prosecute.
July 3rd, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Unenforced Laws
I would expect that it’s a bad idea to have laws that are not going to be properly enforced. If we’re not willing to enforce it, then it shouldn’t be codified in our laws…
July 3rd, 2005 at 8:15 pm
etcetera..as in the already mentioned cd burning..jaywalking..smoking cannabis..taking labels off mattresses etc etc etc..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
July 3rd, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Yes, as in all of that, as I say in the linked post. (Note that the above is a trackback excerpt, not a comment.)
July 4th, 2005 at 11:07 am
“it’s illegal to make a copy of a CD even if you own it”
Which is a stupid law. Archival copies of CD’s hurt no-one, yet it’s illegal. But, it’s not archival copies that the law is againest, it’s pirvacy, which is defined as making a copy of something and selling it to make a profit. So way isn’t the laws relating to this more specific?
Smacking a fork out of a childs hand whos about to stick it in an electrical socket is reasonable. Whipping a child with a hose because it annoyed you is not. However, for some, a grey area comes into it in resect to ‘physical disipline’. Now, to me, hitting a child to try and teach it something is fairly stupid. Sure it may learn ‘don’t do that’, or at least ‘don’t trust that person’, but it’s not learning, for example, ‘running away down the road is dangerous because there are cars that may not be able to see me, and I should stay close to my parents so that I’m protected’.
It seems to me that many NZ parents want to be able to continue using physical disipline, and although that seems barbaric to me, this is thier country too and they deserve to have legislation that protects thier way of life. However, I think most people can agree abuse is not justifiable, and I think reforming laws to enforce an anti-abuse stance is a step in the right direction, and I hope that some day smacking itself will be outlawed.
July 4th, 2005 at 11:10 am
On a slightly related note to my last post I make a statement: Just because laws currently exist that arn’t enforced isn’t an excuse to create new laws that arn’t enforced. Surely, more than anything, it’s a reason to go over our old out-of-date laws with a fine tooth comb, straighting out or removing altogether laws which arn’t used in present day.
July 4th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
jeez me dad catch me on computers .. he got wussian girls in its .. he going to give me a section 59 but i shows him and i says i donts tell the mum he gots the wussian bride to looks at and i gets to use computer ..and i donts get a section 59
July 4th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
The idealist in me says “inforce the “reasonable force” part of the existing law properly and we wouldn’t have a problem”
The realist in me says “repeal section 59 and end the fake defence for assault”
I think it is great that this issue is getting this disscussion started.