Advocates Posing as Academics

Propaganda and The Anti-Smacking Shills

The fallacy of false cause is pretty much universal amongst academics these days--which is to say they cannot think straight.  We have had presented to us one of the more hyper-ventilated examples recently.  In the NZ Herald an Australian academic breathlessly informs us that parental smacking of children to discipline them is utterly terrible.  The academic in question, Bernadette Saunders is introduced to us as follows:

Bernadette Saunders is a Senior Lecturer Social Work at Monash University. She has received two separate funding grants from the Australian Research Council and the Legal Services Board Grants Program to pursue research on the physical punishment /lawful correction of children.

Our academic expert has received money to "pursue research" into the "physical punishment/lawful correction of children".  This is a thorough misdirection.  Mz Saunders is an ideological advocate, a shill, not an objective researcher.  She is being funded for purposes of propaganda.  She is not an honest trader.  How do we know this?

Firstly, the piece published in the NZ Herald was based upon an article by Saunders published in The Conversation  otherwise known as The Diatribe.

The recently released UNICEF report on violence against children draws on data from 190 countries to present a very grim picture of the physical and emotional harm children continue to suffer. Much of this harm is perpetrated by the adults upon whom the child depends for his or her safety and well-being, guidance and positive example.

The UNICEF report clearly states that violence in all its forms can rob children’s dignity, diminish their self-worth, and threaten their optimal development. Children not only suffer its immediate physical and emotional effects; the violence they see and experience is likely to impact on the type of adult they become and the future society of which they will be part.

The most common form of violence that children suffer is the often taken-for-granted “disciplinary” violence – physical force and verbal intimidation – used by parents and teachers as punishment and or to control or change children’s annoying or unacceptable behaviours. Worldwide, six out of ten children aged between two and 14 are regularly physically punished.

It is dubious indeed that an ostensibly credible academic would cite a United Nations report as any kind of authority.  The UN is a morally bankrupt, corrupt institution and any advocacy by it or its offshoots must be treated with a great deal of caution.  But that aside, the sentence in Saunders's diatribe which especially caught our eye was this:

In Australia, a study of child homicide between 1991 and 2005 in New South Wales concluded that prohibiting the corporal punishment of children could save children’s lives.  Thirty-five years ago, Sweden became the first country in the world to legally prohibit the corporal punishment of children in all settings. It is now banned in 39 countries, including New Zealand, the only English-speaking country to adopt this progressive step. [Emphasis, ours]

Smacking has been banned in New Zealand now for years.  It is at this point we come to the fallacy of false cause.  Advocates and ideologues allege that parental smacking of children as part of disciplining them is a form of violence against children, which risks subjecting them to ever greater forms of violence (the old "slippery slope" argument).  It is alleged that those parents who smack their children for purposes of correction and training are more likely to beat them mercilessly and even kill them in blind fits of rage.  Really?  But worse, children subject to parental correction by use of a smack or spank are likely, themselves, to become violent adults in time.  Violence begets violence.  That's why policemen are such violent thugs at home, repeatedly putting choke holds on their four year olds.  That's why soldiers who have seen active duty bayonet their children and neighbours as they lie sleeping.  That's why slaughter men at the abattoirs are likely to stab their children at will.  It's all so obvious.  Right before our eyes.  

If all of the above were even remotely true, New Zealand's rate of child abuse should now be declining rapidly, since smacking has been banned here long enough now to make a startling impact upon adult-child violence.  New Zealand, thus, has become an interesting test case to see whether the ideologues, such as Saunders, are right, or whether they are engaged in fallacious, crooked thinking.  Clearly, the latter is the case.  Why?  Because, according to the NZ Government, in 2014

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of physical child abuse in the development [sic] world. We also have one of the worst rates of child death by maltreatment within the family.  Children can also be abused emotionally and sexually.  All such abuse has a damaging effect on a child’s well-being and future development. [Emphasis, ours]

Therefore, we are on safe ground to reject utterly the arguments of Mz Saunders and her ilk.  New Zealand made child smacking illegal years ago.  Our rates of family violence are at the highest of the "developed world".  So, Saunders causal argument trying to link smacking and child abuse collapses in a heap.  She has attempted to pull wool over our eyes using the fallacy of false cause.  In fact, she and her ilk are just plain wrong.  Hucksters.  Propagandists.  Ideologues.  The New Zealand evidence refutes their argument. If smacking to correct and train a child actually cause further violence against children and intra-family violence in general, our rates of physical abuse of children and family violence, now that smacking is illegal, would be declining rapidly by now.  Since the reserve is the case, Saunders's argument implodes. 

And how about Sweden--that oft-cited paragon of social virtue?  It has also banned smacking many moons ago.  Ah, not so good.  Sweden has the third highest rate of rape in the world; people there fear crime more than in the United States.  The total crime rate is second highest in the world.  The rate of actual assaults in fourth highest in the world. 

The prima facie evidence is the exact opposite: outlaw reasonable force as part of the discipline of children and the outcome is greater crime and greater violence both inside families and outside them.  Now, we would not have the chutzpah of a modern academic to assert that such corollaries are necessarily true.  More research would need to be done.  But the prima facie evidence is much, much stronger than the contrary case asserted by Mz Saunders and her colleagues. 

But advocacy and research have always been a dangerous combination. As the old saw goes, "our advocacy is based upon facts, madam, and if you don't like our facts, we have different ones."