Keynote Speaker: Anne Smith

Professor Anne Smith has been Director of the Children's Issues Centre (CIC), an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, since 1995. Anne is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ, and is the recipient of the NZ Association for Research in Education McKenzie Award for innovative research and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oulu Finland. She has written Understanding Children's Development, and many other publications. Anne's research is framed by sociology of childhood, children's rights, and socio-ecological theoretical perspectives, which emphasise children as social actors, interpreters and participants in the events and experiences of their lives. Anne has worked recently with her colleagues at the CIC on a literature review on the Discipline and Guidance of Children under contract to the Office of the Children's Commissioner.

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Long considered an effective, and even necessary, means of socialising children, physical punishment has been revealed to be a predictor of a wide range of negative developmental outcomes. It has been consistently associated with aggression and antisocial behaviour, psychological maladjustment, impaired parent-child relationships, and physical injury. Research on children's perspectives on physical punishment has indicated that it fuels anger and resentment, is felt as rejection,and leads to avoidance of the punitive parent.

Such research findings have contributed to a worldwide shift in the definition of physical punishment, from an act of discipline to an act of violence. Sweden, the world leader in this shift, removed the criminal defense to corrective force from the Penal Code in 1957. With that change,physical punishment became an act of assault. In 1979, Sweden added a new law to the Civil Code that affirmed children's rights to protection from all forms of physical punishment. Since then, at least 13 countries have passed similar legislation to send a clear message that children have rights to physical integrity and dignity and that these rights, guaranteed under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, can no longer be violated in the name of discipline.

In this address, Professor Anne Smith will summarize the current state of knowledge about the outcomes of physical punishment. Then, Professor Joan Durrant will describe the international shift taking place in attitudes and in law that is rapidly re-naming physical punishment as legalised violence and an historical anachronism.