Legal Change as a Means of Child Protection: The Story of a Campaign

Author

Jane Ritchie

Organisation

Department of Psychology, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

For nearly forty five years James Ritchie and I have been studying child rearing in New Zealand. In our first study, in the early nineteen sixties, we noted that New Zealand families' relied heavily on physical punishment as a form of discipline. It was not until our second study, fourteen years later, that we realized how strongly this practice was continuing. Despite positive changes in family structures and relationships, and despite evidence that this practice could have harmful consequences to children, the majority of our research participants continued to believe in its desirability and necessity. This led us to seek some public means of change.

The obvious choice was to begin a campaign to change the law. The New Zealand Crimes Act contained a section which provided a defense against the charge of assault. Section 59 allowed parents and teachers to use force, by way of chastisement, as long as the force used was reasonable in the circumstances. In 1990, as a result of pressure from within the profession, the reference to teachers was removed from the Act. But the government was not prepared, at that time, to also remove the reference to parents. Children, therefore, remained, and still remain, exposed toinappropriate physical punishment. We had no idea, in 1979, when we began to advocate for the deletion of section 59, that this practice was so deeply entrenched in New Zealand culture and popular conceptions of parental rights and that, twenty six years later, there would still be controversy when the question of the deletion of Section 59 from our Crimes Act was publicly discussed.

Our campaign began with a submission to the 1978 Select Committee on Violent Offending; this had no effect. Other submissions followed eg to the Ministerial Committee of Inquiry into Violence in 1988, with a similar lack of results. Politicians simply refused to address the issue.

This paper will detail our campaign for the deletion of section 59 from 1978 until the present day. It will also report on the way support widened with the contributions of the Children's Commissioner, EPOCH and the University of Otago Children's Issues Centre and on what happened when a member of parliament, Sue Bradford, was successful in having her private member's bill drawn from the ballot box and placedbefore parliament. At the widest level, this experience casts light on the relationship between social legislation and attitude change.

Presentation

Paper

Biography

Jane Ritchie is a professor of psychology at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. She has been studying New Zealand families with her husband, James Ritchie, for more than forty years. Together, they have written seven books on child rearing practices and attitudes in New Zealand and the Pacific. Jane and James have lectured together in courses on violence in family and society and Jane is also issued in women's issues, particularly women's roles as partners and mothers and in the pressures on women to conform to unrealistic and unrealizable beauty ideals.