Madam Speaker, that thoughtful question deserves a lot more attention than it is going to receive today.
One could make the case that there is little evidence available to suggest that violence of any kind is ever helpful. I know my friend and some of us might think it is, but we have to look at hard evidence. What evidence is there that striking a young person, in particular a little person, actually changes or modifies that person's behaviour?
I will use one example. I train horses as a hobby. There are two approaches to horse training. There is the violent approach which is called breaking animals. You break a horse. The horse's spirit is broken and then it decides to follow along with what you want it to do. The Horse Whisperer, the individual we are probably all familiar with from movies and so on, trained the horse to do whatever he wanted it to do through kindness. There is little evidence to suggest that violent horse breaking is better than kindness horse breaking, but we can discuss this matter further.