Commissioners Call for Change in Law to Ban Smacking of Children
The UK's Children's Commissioners have urged the government to introduce a legal ban on smacking children by amending the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill as it progresses through Parliament.
In a joint statement, the Commissioners described the current law—which still allows the defence of 'reasonable punishment' in England and Northern Ireland—as 'outdated and morally repugnant.'
Their intervention follows renewed public attention on the issue after the murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif in Surrey.
In November 2024, her father, stepmother, and uncle were convicted after years of Sara's abuse that her father reportedly described as 'legal punishment.'
'Let this be Sara's legacy, that all children in the United Kingdom are given the same protection as anyone else,' said Children's Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza.
She urged the government to remove the 'reasonable punishment' defence from both English law and the Children Act 2004.
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During the bill's second reading in the House of Lords on Thursday, Baroness Anne Longfield, former Children's Commissioner for England, echoed the call for change.
'The change has happened in Wales, in Scotland and in Ireland, and the world has not fallen in. It is probably time we caught up,' she told peers.
Unequal Protection Across the UK
Physical punishment of children has already been banned in Scotland (2020) and Wales (2022). However, children in England and Northern Ireland still do not have full legal protection from physical assault.
The government has said it will review evidence from Wales, due by the end of 2025, before deciding on potential law reform.
'We do not intend to legislate on the defence at this stage,'
'We recognise that parents have different views and approaches to disciplining their children. We need to consider their voices, and those of the child, trusted stakeholders and people who might be disproportionately affected by the removal of the defence, in making any decisions.
'Let us also be clear: those children who have been abused or murdered by their parents would not have been covered by the defence of reasonable punishment. Crown Prosecution Service guidance is very clear about what is acceptable within the law to justify reasonable punishment,' she added.
Despite the government's stance, the Commissioners argue that the law must be changed to ensure equal protection from assault for all children across the UK.
'The experience of Scotland and Wales, where children are already offered full protection from assault and violence, does not suggest any increase in parents and carers being criminalised – no loving, well-meaning parent has anything to fear from a defence to assault being removed from the law,' their statement said.
Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza during an interview with PA Media on College Green, in Westminster, London, on March 27, 2023.
Yui Mok/PA
Doctors and Charities Back Legislative Change
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has found that children who experience physical punishment are 2.6 times more likely to suffer mental health issues and more than twice as likely to experience serious abuse.
RCPCH Officer for Child Protection Andrew Rowland has argued against 'grey areas when it comes to safeguarding children.'
'Changing the laws in England and Northern Ireland will give us absolute clarity and ensure there are no instances where it is acceptable or lawful to smack a child,' he said in a statement last year.
Children's charity Barnardo's and a coalition of organisations have also
Opponents Voice Concerns
Campaigners opposing the ban say it would criminalise well-meaning parents and overwhelm child protection services with minor cases.
The
The group argues that the current law already protects children from abuse.
'The amendment would only serve to outlaw the mildest tap on the hand or a gentle smack on the back of the legs. Anything which leaves more than a transitory reddening of the skin is already illegal.'
'It needs to be enforced, not changed,' the group
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Miami Herald
6 hours ago
- Miami Herald
A daughter with DACA, a mother without papers, and a goodbye they can't bear
Michelle Valdes' mom thinks she sees immigration agents everywhere: in the lobby of the building where she cares for elderly clients, at the local outlet mall, on downtown corners. The fear is constant. Driving to work, going to the store —just leaving the house feels too risky for her. At work, while she cooks and cleans in her clients' homes, she listens as stories of immigration detentions, deportations and constantly changing laws and policies play loudly in English from the TV. The 67-year-old undocumented Colombian national who has lived in the United States for more than a third of her life has stopped driving completely, opting for Uber, and ducking down in the backseat when she sees police officers. As a Jehovah's Witness, she has chosen not to do her door-to-door ministry and only attends church on Zoom. But what keeps her up at night these days is that she will soon go without seeing her daughter, likely for close to a decade. She is preparing to leave the United States after 23 years, leaving behind her 31-year-old daughter, a DACA recipient or 'Dreamer' who came to the United States when she was 8 and is still in the process of gaining her green card. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, is a federal program that protects undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children from deportation. 'I don't want to feel like I'm going to be spending two months in some detention center in the middle of God knows where, where none of my family members see me,' she said in Spanish during an interview with the Herald. She asked not to use her name for this story because she fears she could be targeted. 'I'm done,' she said. Her daughter's immigration situation is also precarious, even though she is married to a U.S. citizen. His family, from Cuba, got lucky when they won the visa lottery. But her family did not have such luck. Valdes' family did what immigrants often do: They fled danger, asked for political asylum, hired lawyers and filed paperwork. And they lost. Last year, only 19.3% of Colombian asylum cases were approved, according to researchers at Syracuse University. Even in 2006, when violence was at a very high point in Colombia, only 32% of asylum cases were approved. Their family's story reveals the toll a constantly changing and exceedingly complicated immigration system has on families who tried to 'do the right thing' and legalize their status. Now, under President Trump's administration, which has ramped up enforcement and the optics around it, being undocumented has become even more hazardous. People who have been living and working in the shadows in the United States are now being forced to decide if the reward of seeking a better life is still worth the risk. And those who are following the rules are afraid the rules will keep changing. The mother has already started packing boxes. Denied asylum Valdes' mom had never heard of the American Dream. She said she had never even heard the phrase 'el sueño americano' before coming to the United States. The family fled Colombia in 2002, leaving behind comfort and status. Valdes' mother had been an architect in Cartagena, a city on the South American nation's Caribbean coast. The family had a driver, a cook and a nanny. But violence by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the rebel group known as FARC, was encroaching on their lives: armed robbery at their home, threatening calls and the kidnapping of her cousin, a wealthy businessperson. The family was forced to pay a ransom for his release. The early 2000s in Colombia, under President Andrés Pastrana, were years of intense violence by guerrilla gangs such as the FARC, who targeted wealthier Colombians. 'They would just pick up anybody who they believed they could get money from,' said Valdes. Her aunt would often call Valdes' mom from Florida, telling her their family would be safer here. The family arrived on a tourist visa in 2002, found a lawyer and applied for asylum. It was denied in 2004. Under U.S. immigration policy, people who have suffered persecution due to factors such as race, religion, nationality, membership to a social group, or political opinion can apply for asylum. It must be filed within a year of arrival in the United States. Valdes' family's interview did not go well and they were placed in removal proceedings. They appealed and in 2006 took the case to the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals. The family's asylum application claimed that Valdes' mom would be killed by the FARC guerilla gang if she returned to Colombia, in connection with her cousin's kidnapping. But the court ultimately found holes in her case, and said her fear is not well founded and that she failed to prove that she would be in danger if she returned to Colombia. Their final motion was denied in part because it was filed 45 days late, according to the court filing. Valdes was just 11 years old when the courts denied her family's final plea to stay in the United States. The family was issued removal orders. 'I feel like I made a mistake asking for asylum,' said Valdes' mother. 'I wasn't guided well because I was scared and didn't know what to do.' She says predatory lawyers charged her close to $40,000 but never told her the truth about her odds of winning the case. 'It's pure show,' she said in Spanish. 'I believed they would help, but they did nothing.' By then, Valdes and her brothers were attending public schools in West Palm Beach, a right undocumented children have because of a supreme court ruling which passed narrowly in the early '80s. 'I just kind of poured my whole life into school, just to kind of distract myself from other things going on in life, specifically with immigration,' she said. In fifth grade, she won the science fair. At Roosevelt Middle School she was in the pre-med program and the national junior honor society. She always had A's and B's in school. But when her middle school national honor society was invited to Australia, she had to stay behind, unable to travel because she was undocumented. At Suncoast Community High School, she was invited to sing in a choir concert in Europe, but again, she could not go. In 2007, ICE detained Valdes' parents and her eldest brother. Her other brother and Valdes were picked up from school and reunited with their parents at the ICE office. Valdes' mom said the officer told her that since the family had a removal order, they needed to deport at least one person to prove they completed their quota for the day. But to this day, Valdes and her mother can't fully explain why the father was deported but they were released. Was it luck? Did the ICE officers sympathize with their family? Then 13, Valdes remembers standing in the Miami immigration office as agents took her father away. 'He was wearing jeans, a tan coat and a gray-blue fisherman's hat,' she said. 'What I remember the most is that there was, like, some sort of feeling that I got, that I knew that I was never gonna see him again.' He was deported in January of 2007, when Valdes was in seventh grade. It was the only semester she ever failed in school, she said. Her father died at 69 in Colombia in 2022. A petition for him to get legal status and return to the U.S., filed on his behalf of his son from a previous marriage, was approved a year after his death, said Valdes. '17 years too late,' she said, in tears. DACA as a lifeline In 2012, Valdes and her mother were preparing to leave the United States for good. Flights were booked. Boxes mailed. Then, just 14 days before departure, President Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The program was meant to protect children like Valdes, who came to the U.S. at a young age. Valdes was 18. Her phone lit up with messages from people in her community who knew she was undocumented. She applied that October. As a 'Dreamer,' or DACA recipient, she's protected from deportation and able to work legally — but can't travel outside the country. Her two older brothers, Ricardo and Jean Paul, had already left the country by then. After attending public schools and graduating from high school, the brothers could not attend college or find work. So in 2011, they returned to Colombia, and their mother sent them money to attend university. They both still live there and haven't seen their mom in 14 years. Valdes' situation was slightly better, but without legal permanent residency, she didn't qualify for most scholarships. The one scholarship she did get was a $4,000 scholarship from the Global Education Center at Palm Beach State, but $1,500 was deducted in taxes because she was considered a foreign student. Starting in 2014, Florida universities provided in-state tuition waivers for undocumented students under certain conditions. But because Valdes didn't enroll in college within a year of graduating from high school, she lost access to the waiver. That waiver was recently canceled in Florida for undocumented students, and starting July 1, at least 6,500 DACA recipients in Florida enrolled in public universities will have to pay the out-of-state tuition rate. 'When people asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I would ask for money to pay my tuition,' she said. Throughout those years, people would come to Valdes asking for help filling out their work permit applications, DACA applications and other legal forms, and they would say, 'Wow, you are so good at it.' Although she never wanted to do anything law or immigration related, she kept getting pulled in that direction, and decided to get her paralegal certificate, Valdes said. She now works at an immigration law office. Her plan is to go to law school after getting hands on training. 'I always thought: When I turn 18, I'm an adult — 'why am I still tied to my mom's case?' ' she said. 'But nobody explained it.' At her job in the law office, she finally learned the full truth of her case. Her name is still listed on her mother's asylum application — the case that was denied in 2006. So she still had a final removal order connected to her name. That case, and its order of removal, still haunts her. Although she's married to a U.S. citizen, it will take her years to adjust her status to get a green card and permanent residency status. The process will involve her husband filing petitions and waivers explaining that it would be an extreme hardship for him if she were deported. Valdes will have to leave the country and re-enter. In all, the process could take around eight years. Former president Joe Biden had a program to help people like Valdes, whose family is of 'mixed-status' but the program was shut down by Republicans. Immigration attorneys say there are fewer and fewer pathways for people married to U.S. citizens to legalize their status. The roadblocks and complications frustrate Valdes to tears. Valdes said that it is not fair that 'under our immigration system, a child, at such a young age, has to suffer the consequences of the parents' mistakes.' 'No es justo, no es justo,' she said, crying. It's not fair. But immigration laws, enforcement and policies are changing every day. 'People say 'get in line, get in line, get in line,' and then you get in line, and it's like, 'Oh, too bad, you don't apply with that anymore, or we're just going to change the laws. Or, you know, you aged out, or you didn't submit by this day,' said Valdes. In the past weeks, ICE agents across the nation have even begun detaining people as they exit immigration courthouses. Some are individuals with final orders of deportation like Valdes and her mom. Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump can revoke humanitarian parole for over 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. President Trump has spoken favorably of DACA recipients, but nonetheless, 'Dreamers' still have to reapply every two years, and there is no guarantee their right to legally be in the U.S. will not be revoked. Immigration attorneys say DACA could be the next program to be shut down by the Supreme Court. 'How shaky is DACA? How solid is it?' Valdes asked. Same fear, different country Valdes' mom says she now feels the same fear in the United States as she did in Colombia — maybe worse. 'I'm scared. Terrified,' she said. 'I'm constantly looking over my shoulder, always on alert.' For years, she tried to hold on. But after 23 years, she's tired of living in limbo. Valdes and her mom try not to think much about the fact that they are leaving each other, focusing more on the present and getting through each day. Valdes' mom says her ultimate goal was always for her daughter to get an education in the United States, and now that her daughter has a job, a husband, and is planting roots, she feels like she can go and let her daughter live her life. She left Colombia because she was 'tired of being followed. I was tired of being paranoid. I was tired of never being able to have my freedom, to just live, because I was always so scared. And fast forward, 23 years later, I'm just in the same boat in a different country,' she said. The hardest part for Valdes is imagining being pregnant and then giving birth without her mom by her side. But, she says, 'Now I tell her, I totally understand. It's your turn to finish living your life, Mom. I want her to be at peace, and I want her to rest.' As her mother prepares to leave, Michelle is left with the frustration of knowing that there's nothing she can do. 'I am still helpless. I still can't help her. I still can't help myself. It's a looming darkness you carry every day,' said Valdes.
Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Today in History: June 7, James Byrd Jr. killed in hate crime
In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Creole of color, was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld 'separate but equal' racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.) Advertisement In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City formally came into existence as the Italian Parliament ratified the Lateran Treaty in Rome. In 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War. In 1965, the US Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples. Advertisement In 1976, New York magazine published an article by journalist Nik Cohn entitled 'The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,' which inspired the film 'Saturday Night Fever,' which in turn sparked a nationwide disco craze. (Cohn admitted in 1997 that the article was actually a work of fiction.) In 1979, Texas became the first state to recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday. (Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.) In 1982, Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis mansion, was opened to the public as a tourist destination, five years after Presley's death. In 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation and led to stronger state and federal hate crime laws, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death and executed for the crime; a third was sentenced to life in prison.) In 2006, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed by a US airstrike on his safe house. In 2021, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul Murdaugh, 22, from a prominent South Carolina legal family, were found shot and killed on their family's property. (Alex Murdaugh, Maggie's husband and Paul's father, would be found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.)
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hopes of closure fade as police wrap up Madeleine McCann search
From the moment I arrived in Praia da Luz on Monday the word on everyone's lips was "closure". All the long-term residents of the sleepy Atlantic resort told me closure was what they were hoping for. From the English woman who lived at the time above the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, to the former neighbour of the main suspect in the case. They all said: "We hope her family get closure". Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann's body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings. But, frustrated as residents are when the world's media return to Praia da Luz - year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees - they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel. How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of uncertainty. For 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.) The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann's room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the town. The Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2011 built to a peak in 2014, with substantial searches near Praia da Luz - but they did not appear to have any identifiable suspects. They had 60 people of interest, 38 of whom they were investigating. Portuguese prosecutors had allowed them to search only one of three sites they had asked for access to. Everything changed in June 2020 when, out of the blue, the head prosecutor in Braunschweig in Germany, Hans Christian Wolters, said he had evidence that Madeleine McCann was dead. Working with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, he said he had identified a suspect, later identified as Christian Brückner. "The evidence is strong enough to say that the girl is dead, and to accuse a specific individual of murder," Hans Christian Wolter said. Brückner, who spent many years of his life in the Algarve, was a drifter, a petty criminal and a convicted sex offender. It all fitted neatly into place and it seemed that the mystery might finally be solved. Brückner's long list of previous convictions includes ones for sexually abusing children in 1994 and 2016. The Braunschweig prosecution team have never disclosed the extent of any evidence they have, but we do know their suspicions are partly based on a conversation an old acquaintance of Brückner's claims they had at a festival in 2008. Helge Busching says the topic of Madeleine McCann's disappearance came up, and Brückner said she "didn't scream". Mr Busching says it was clear to him what Brückner meant. Since 2019, Brückner has been in prison in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005. But he is due for release in September, or in January if he does not pay an outstanding fine. Brückner told an RTL reporter earlier this year that he was looking forward to a "decent steak and a beer". The concern is that he will leave the country and head somewhere with no extradition treaty with Germany, though he appears to have no money. The Braunschweig prosecutors' confidence was dealt a severe blow last year when they put Brückner on trial for rape and unconnected attempted child abductions. Mr Busching gave evidence, but the court in Braunschweig acquitted Brückner and suddenly time was very short. Mr Wolters has made no secret of the fact that he wants more evidence to charge Brückner. That is why the BKA footed the bill for the search this week in ruined farm buildings on merciless, shadeless scrubland in the rising heat of an Algarve summer. The buildings are frequented at night by the kind of drifters and petty criminals that Brückner once was. Nearby residents told us they sometimes find looted suitcases among the ruins that have been stolen from holidaymakers. But this week's searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite vague. It all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching's statements with concrete, physical evidence. In some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard ground. But the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble. They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings' floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath. The Portuguese fire brigade helped on the first day, pumping out an old well so it could be safely searched. The officers were looking for traces of Madeleine McCann, or some of her clothing. Every time I travel to Portugal for a new search it always begins optimistically. Could police find something this time? But on every occasion it quickly becomes apparent the searches are not tightly targeted. The police work always clearly based on quite vague intelligence - or just an investigator's hunch. Luis Neves, the National Director of the Polícia Judiciária, the Portuguese equivalent of the FBI, said at the end of the week that, "nothing is in vain, not least because doors are being closed". As we watched the German detectives packing away it felt like the spring of hope of a resolution that had bubbled up in June 2020 was evaporating in the thankless heat. Diggers brought in to help latest Madeleine McCann search in Portugal Madeleine McCann search goes on but is it 18 years too late? Madeleine McCann disappearance: A timeline
