To: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation
'Australia talks back'

Sent: 7-11-02

Subject: Smacking

I should like to decouple the smack from the disciplining bit, as it appears to be linked in your premise...

Physical punishment should rightly be banned outright, just as chopping off a thief's hand for stealing is no longer widely practised :-) even though it might have worked as a deterrent rather than punishment.

But the odd smack, in the right circumstances, might just be permissible: as the parents of four children brought here from XXX 30-odd years ago, both my wife and I did not mete out 'physical punishment' at any time, believing rather in the UK Summerhill school principles...nor did we smack!

But: our middle daughter once copped a smack behind the ears when she was 15, standing fully clothed in our bathtub screaming hysterically because she was not allowed to go to a beach party in XXX. She immediately snapped out of it - the intended result - then stormed up to XXX police station to denounce her father's 'abuse'. I went up to collect her, and still remember 20 years later how intensely proud I was of her self-assertion...

Her elder sister received the only smack of her life when she was 18, and in the process of dumping a boy friend with a prior claim to her evening outing for another caller who offered more interesting fare than a movie. I was so incensed by this mercenary attitude that I smacked her...

The youngest daughter was never smacked, but the eldest, a boy, may have received the occasional 'pat on the back' when he was young and difficult. However, I'd have to ask him about it, because I don't remember...

In none of these cases was smacking intended as a 'punishment'; rather, it was a sort of signal: up to here and no further!

We had jokingly adopted a Spanish mother's threat when things got a bit rough: 'me quito el zapato' (I'll take off my shoe...), which never impressed her 4-5-year-old daughter - and which was NEVER followed by the action!