{"id":15387,"date":"2019-10-03T10:28:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T09:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/?p=15387"},"modified":"2019-10-03T16:28:54","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T15:28:54","slug":"scotland-to-be-the-first-uk-country-to-ban-smacking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/scotland-to-be-the-first-uk-country-to-ban-smacking\/","title":{"rendered":"Scotland To Be The First UK Country To Ban Smacking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Scotland is about to become the first country in the UK to make it a criminal offence for parents to smack their children.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Parents and carers are currently allowed to use &#8220;reasonable&#8221; physical force to discipline children, but the Scottish government has backed moves to give children the same protection from assault as adults. A ban on all physical punishment is expected to be overwhelmingly backed by the Scottish Parliament in a vote on Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 634px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/6F78\/production\/_109063582_gettyimages-473678852.jpg\" alt=\"upset child\" width=\"624\" height=\"351\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Opponents of the ban say mild smacking does no long-term harm to a child, but many charities and educational psychologists disagree<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In Scots Law, all physical attacks on adults can be treated as assault, but strangely enough, children do not have the same protection. This is because a person accused of assaulting of a child can<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;claim a defence of &#8220;reasonable chastisement&#8221; or &#8220;justifiable assault&#8221; when they have used physical force as a form of discipline on children under the age of 16.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A report published by a group of Scottish children&#8217;s charities in 2015 found that the physical punishment of children was more common in the UK than in similar countries such as the US, Canada, Italy, Germany and Sweden.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers estimated that between 70% and 80% of parents in the UK have used physical punishment, with children aged between three and seven the most likely to be smacked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scotland is about to become the first country in the UK to make it a criminal offence for parents to smack their children. Parents and carers are currently allowed to use &#8220;reasonable&#8221; physical force to discipline children, but the Scottish government has backed moves to give children the same protection from assault as adults. A&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":15388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[71,43],"class_list":["post-15387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk-news","tag-news","tag-uk-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15389,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15387\/revisions\/15389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}