Posted on Mon 30 Jan 2012

David Lammy may have retreated from his claim that not being able to smack children was one of the causes of the August riots, but he has repeated a bogus claim made by a number of others, and then tried to hide behind the genuine concern that all parents have as to how to raise their children effectively.

At the time of the riots we challenged those who suggested that ‘not being able to smack’ was a contributing factor in the unrest.  This is untrue for three reasons.  First, anyone who has spent any time looking at parenting techniques will tell you that impact is determined by a range of individual, relationship and societal factors, and can often be seen with two children in the same family behaving differently in similar situations.  Therefore, the presence or absence of one form of discipline is unlikely to provide any explanation for the events of August.   Second, Mr Lammy has produced no systematic evidence that those who were rioting were not smacked as children.  He and others imply this, but do not demonstrate it.  Third, the international evidence is that smacking often leads to greater aggressiveness, even in very young children, amongst a range of other poor consequences.  If this evidence can be applied to the August riots, then it would predict that the rioters were more likely to have been smacked.

Unfortunately, Mr Lammy and others are guilty of other failures too.  The repetition of the mantra that parents from some communities are more likely to smack is not borne out by our evidence of delivering parent education programmes across England: where smacking is used it is used across all ethnic groups. 

Parents do feel under pressure and how they should or should not discipline their children is one aspect of this.  But it is the case that every generation of parents have felt similar pressures.  If Mr Lammy is really concerned about parenting he should be challenging the withdrawal of funding for parent education programmes such as Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities that have demonstrated that parents and their children can be helped to deal with these pressures and raise children of which we can all be proud.

For more information, please:

• contact Jabeer Butt, Deputy Chief Executive of the Race Equality Foundation (020 7619 6220)
• see the Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities programme project pages
• see our response to 'Parenting, discipline and the riots in England'
• see our letter to the Guardian, 1st February 2012 (external website).