Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise to speak to Motion No. 528, which reads as follows:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should defend section 43 of the Criminal Code in the courts and should invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms if necessary.
What exactly does Section 43 of the Criminal Code state? It deals with the correction of a child by force. It states:
Every schoolteacher, parent or person standing in place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under his care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.
Therein lies the rub, “what is reasonable under the circumstances”. We know that what may appear reasonable to one person may certainly be unreasonable to others.
We oppose this motion. We feel that, if anything, section 43 should be repealed, whereas this motion talks about maintaining section 43. We feel that it should be repealed because it is a 19th century law that was first codified in 1892 which legally sanctions physical violence against children. It should be repealed, not preserved.
Section 43 has been used as a successful criminal defence by parents who have hit their children with straps, belts, sticks and extension cords, causing bruises, welts and abrasions. People have used this defence in court to justify that behaviour toward children.
Children are the only class of Canadian citizens who can legally be assaulted for their correction. We do not hit adults to correct them. We gave up years ago using the whip to correct adults, but for some reason we feel that we can assault children to correct them.
People have argued that this does not have any adverse effect upon children. We agree that it is obvious children have to be taught and socialized, but the legal right to hit them as a method of training is wrong because it is contrary to basic human rights. It promotes violence as a legitimate response to conflict and it leads to physical and emotional harm to thousands of children each year.
They can talk about all the studies they want. People can pick the studies they want to support their point of view. I am going to give a very real example of how such physical activity, allegedly to correct a child and probably done by the people involved thinking it was reasonable under the circumstances, affected one individual in Canada, and I am sure he is only one among many.
A constituent wrote to me. I checked with him before coming here tonight to ask if I could talk a bit about his case. He said “By all means. Use my name if necessary”, but I will not use his name. This young fellow was adopted in 1956 and lived in a small village in Nova Scotia. He talks about his early childhood when he had a very severe bed wetting problem. What was his parents' response to this bed wetting problem? They would spank him to try to cure him of it. That was their strategy. Instead of curing it, it got worse.
At the age of five he began school. He talks about the principal as being a huge, six-foot, four-inch tall monster, with a stern face and a very cold personality. He tells us that this person would discipline him. He had only been in school a couple of weeks when he received his first strapping. He said: “Boy did it hurt. It made my father's spanking feel like child's play. I stood there with my hand out and I was given 15 straps on each hand. I was bawling my eyes out and screaming at the top of my lungs. The louder I screamed, the harder this person strapped”.
Finally it got so bad he said “I pissed my pants. After the strapping I was sent back to class in my wet pants until it was time to go home”. When he got home his mother said “Well, you must have done something to deserve it”. He was then given a spanking for wetting his pants. This was all sanctioned under the code. He was spanked. The mother was enraged and said “He is not only bed wetting now but he is also wetting his pants”.
This continued until the end of grade one. Then he moved into grade two. In grade two his principal was a bulky man, about 230 pounds and five feet eight inches tall and made his previous principal look like a boy scout by comparison. The same thing happened. He was strapped almost daily. He said “I was strapped approximately 60 to 70 times in that year and my spirit was definitely broken”. To make matters worse, the bullies in his class would chase him home and beat him up.
He said “At eight years old I was a tortured, scared little boy, very quickly filling with hatred and anxiety and wishing I was dead”. He talks further about how this kind of abuse continued in the school system, condoned by the law the Reform Party would like to maintain and buttress up.
He said “Life had become unbearable and I remember praying to God on many occasions to let me die and end this insanity. It had come to the point where every day after school I would run out of school as soon as the bell rang and head straight for the woods behind the school and work my way through the woods in order not to be seen by people and to be beat up by these bullies. Every morning as the class sang O Canada I would be strapped for running home through the woods rather than walking home in an orderly fashion”.
It is a matter of interpretation when people talk about what is reasonable and unreasonable. I am sure the school authorities of the day would argue that they were using reasonable means to train these children and to bring them up in a proper way so that they would behave properly. We see this activity as far from reasonable, but people want to maintain this kind of activity.
Over the period of four years he was strapped 300 to 400 times. When he turned 13 years old, in order to gain acceptance from his fellow classmates, he turned to alcohol and smoking pot. It became an addiction. This was the effect of this kind of discipline and activity in his life. I am sure there are many people out there who find themselves in similar circumstances and who over the years have experienced what has been correction by force.
There are contemporary parenting courses and publications on child rearing and discipline that give effective and practical advice on non-violent alternatives to spanking and hitting. Sure it takes a little bit more work.
My hon. friend from the Conservative Party said that it was necessary sometimes to have to discipline a child in this way. We have to find other ways to discipline our children so we are not hitting them. When we hit a child it in turn teaches them to hit others and we see it accelerating.
Look at some of the activities taking place today in the school system and some of the actions of children right across the country where they have no respect for other people. Part of it is probably because they have not been respected as a person. We do not respect a person when we are so much larger than they are and we grab them when they have no defence and physically shake or spank them.
The bottom line is we must always ask ourselves how would we like to be treated? Would we appreciate someone grabbing us and spanking us? Perhaps some people would. In all honesty no one wants to be overpowered by someone bigger than themselves. They do not want to feel helpless and defenceless while they are physically struck. This is what we are talking about.
We have to look at other means of disciplining our children. Give them guidance, give them love, give them direction. Set an example that they would want to follow rather than show them that it is okay for someone bigger than they are to hit them in order to correct them. We must ask ourselves are we treating people in the way we want to be treated?
The Reform Party pays great lip service to family values and the importance of children, but it does not appear to care about protecting children from the physical and emotional pain of violent abuse which is currently safeguarded by section 43. In advocating the preservation of this section that justifies and rationalizes corporal punishment, the Reform Party is ignoring the fact that current conditions are intolerable.
There were 4,229 substantiated cases of physical abuse investigated in Ontario alone in 1993. Attempts to discipline by corporal punishment were suspected in 85% of the substantiated cases. People oftentimes start out lightly disciplining but as the child gets a little more stubborn, all of a sudden the parent gets a little more forceful and what started out perhaps as a gentle spanking ends up being much worse.
I urge all members of the House to look realistically at this. They should not try to justify it because of what may have happened to them in the past, and say “Well, I was spanked and I am okay”. They should look realistically at what it is doing to children and be honest with themselves and decide to oppose the motion and all forms of physical violence to children.