Sir Frank Peters :
Children throughout the Republic of Slovenia are openly celebrating in the streets their emancipation from the cruelty of corporal punishment.
Their motherland has done what’s moral, right and proper for its young inhabitants to become the 51st state in the world to prohibit corporal punishment to its children in all settings. This makes Slovenia the 30th Council of Europe member state and the 21st European Union state to do so.
Prohibiting all forms of corporal punishment of children is a well established obligation under international human rights law, but incredibly there are still 92 states where governments have not yet made a public commitment to law reform, and in 69 states, corporal punishment has not been fully prohibited in schools.
2015 was a good year for children in Ireland, Benin, and Peru where legislature banned corporal punishment to its children across the board. This year Mongolia, Paraguay and Slovenia followed.
But still there is a long way to go. Despite the massive amount of studies and evidence accumulated worldwide that clearly condemns corporal punishment for its ineffectiveness and the damage it causes, only 10% of the world’s children are fully protected in law from the abuse.
Many countries, to their disgrace, that signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are still ‘dragging their heels’ in implementing necessary change to abolish corporal punishment to children. Some American States are at odds with each other; some are for, some are against corporal punishment to children despite the overwhelming evidence that clearly screams (loud) corporal punishment is ineffective, immoral, humiliating, degrading, harmful and serves no useful purpose.
There are 19 Godforsaken states in the USA at present that by misconceived, outmoded, draconian laws and a super-sized serving of ignorance, still allow their children to be abused in schools. To their credit, however, the authorities maintain jail cells in sufficient numbers to house all the broken teens and adults they’ve helped create. Some countries at best fail to prohibit corporal punishment to children and at worst specifically authorize their corporal punishment and set out the details of how it should be inflicted.
Bangladesh is committed to reforming its laws to prohibit corporal punishment in all settings. Bangladeshis worldwide can boast and take pride in the initiative by Supreme Court Justices Md. Imman Ali and Md. Sheikh Hasan Arif to outlaw corporal punishment in Bangladesh in 2011, but five years on confirmation in legislation is still a missing.
At the time the noble justices defined the immoral abusive act as, ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and a clear violation of a child’s fundamental right to life, liberty and freedom’ and this Bangladeshi-spun phrase has become a battle cry of anti corporal punishment campaigners worldwide ever since.
The Slovenian legislators define corporal punishment of children as “any physical, cruel or degrading punishment of children or any other act with the intention to punish children, containing elements of physical, psychological or sexual violence or neglect as an educational method.”
The Slovenian government is to allocate special funding for training in the field of violence, particularly violence against children, and positive parenting programmes.
(The writer, Sir Frank Peters is a former newspaper and magazine publisher and editor, a humanitarian, and foreign friend of Bangladesh.)
