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California Congresswoman Wants Spanking Made a Criminal Offence on Par with Child Abuse

By Cassidy Bugos

SAN FRANCISCO, January 19, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A California congresswoman has announced she is drafting a bill that would outlaw the spanking of any child under the age of three.

Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, says the bill will be written broadly, to ban “any striking of a child, any corporal punishment, smacking, hitting, punching, any of that.”

Lieber says she would like to see spanking treated as a class 3 misdemeanor child abuse, punishable by up to a year in jail or a fine of up to $1000 – although she admitted that one legal expert advising her doubts that first time offenders could be asked to do anything more than attend parenting classes.

Public opinion of the proposed bill appears skeptical at best. A January 18 poll of 500 Bay Area adults conducted by Survey USA showed 57% opposed to the ban, and 11% undecided.

Even parents who say they do not spank their own children are nonetheless wary of the government enforcing their decision, and certainly don’t want to see ordinary discipline within the home being grouped together with child abuse.

Besides, a San Francisco mother of a one-year-old girl told the pollsters: “There are cases of child abuse, and those need to be addressed . . . [But] I don’t know if this law would help those children.”

Although both public and congressional opinion appears initially unfavorable, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed guarded interest in the bill.

“I just want to find out from [Lieber] exactly the way she envisions it and to enforce it and what the whole thing is about . . . anytime we try to pass laws that say you’ve got to protect kids, it’s in general always good. So we have to find about [sic] more about it.”

The governor said frankly that he was spanked often as a child, and expressed no bitterness. “I grew up, I got smacked about everything. That was just the way Austria worked.”

Lieber, hearing about the governor’s initial reception of her proposal, thanked him and expressed her condolences.

“My heart goes out to him to hear he was beaten; that’s just not right.”

Although no U.S. state has a prohibition on corporal punishment of children, since 1979 more than a dozen European countries have outlawed spanking in response to mounting pressure from the UN, which has repeatedly called for a global criminalization of all corporal punishment of children – to be imposed irrespective of parental beliefs about the authentic well-being of the child.

See related LifeSiteNews coverage:

UN Continues to Push for Criminalization of Spanking
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jul/05072105.html

United Nations Insists Japan, Armenia and Guyana Criminalize Spanking by Parents
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/feb/04020403.html

Canadian Liberal Senator Seeks to Criminalize Spanking as a Form of Discipline
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jun/05060806.html

Northern Irish Parents Who “Smack” to be Criminalized
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06091208.html

House of Lords Compromises on Banning Traditional Parenting – Spanking by Parents
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/jul/04070607.html

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