A total ban on corporal punishment is among the recommendations of the National Violence Prevention Commission.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness, announced two of the recommendations while addressing sixth-form students and their teachers at Manchester High School in Mandeville, on January 12.
The National Violence Prevention Commission was mandated to conduct a continuing comprehensive review of all existing public and private violence-prevention programmes as well as the government’s strategies.
Its purpose is to identify gaps in the prevention and intervention services and make recommendations with respect to appropriate programmes.
The Prime Minister revealed recently that he had received preliminary data from the Commission.
“So, the Government has put in place a Commission to study this whole business of violence. And there are some recommendations that will come. There are a few of them, for example a recommendation that has been about for a long time, but the Commission has studied it in detail and the recommendation is that there should be a total ban on corporal punishment,” Holness said.
“That is going to be a controversial one, but I think that the society is at the point now where it must confront itself on how it uses violence as a means of disciplining children, because that’s what corporal punishment is. It is a violation of the personhood of the child,” he added.
Corporal or physical punishment is defined by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which oversees the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as “any punishment in which physical force is used and intended to cause some degree of pain or discomfort, however light”.
According to the Committee, this mostly involves hitting (smacking, slapping, spanking) children with a hand or implement (whip, stick, belt, shoe, wooden spoon or similar), but it can also involve, for example, kicking, shaking or throwing children, scratching, pinching, biting, pulling hair or boxing ears, forcing children to stay in uncomfortable positions, burning, scalding or forced ingestion.
In 2017, the Prime Minister in his Budget debate announced that the Government would amend the Education Act to explicitly prohibit corporal punishment in schools.
Source: JIS