線ll cyntaf gyda'r dwi'n dim yn ffordd gwrthol. We have apologies for the section of the meeting from Annie Wells, MSP and Oliver Mundell MSP. This is the eighth meeting of the Equality and Human Rights Committee. I remind everyone to switch their mobile phones off and put them away. I welcome Professor Robert Lars-Oulaire and the Human Development and Family Science Oklahoma stage university. You're very welcome this afternoon, Professor. Can I invite you to make an opening statement of up to three minutes, please? Okay, thank you very much. And thank you for letting me up here before your committee about this important bill. I share your primary concern, which is the welfare of the children of Scotland. At the reason I devoted my career to parenting research, I thought children needed the best of research, not the best research does not be for putting people on the moon, but for helping children achieve their full potential. I've asked three, two primary questions that you need to know the answer to. One, what should we tell parents to use instead of smacking when we tell them not to smack their children? Secondly, it's clear that smacking is correlated with anti-social aggression and other kind of adverse looking outcomes. Is that correlation, is that correlation because smacking is causing more problems? Or is it because children that are more oppositional force parents to use more of all discipline tactics? I've been recognized as one of the leading experts on smacking an alternative to it since at least 1996, when I was one of seven invited speakers to the only scientific consensus conference on the outcomes of corporal punishment, co-sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics and published in their journal Pediatrics in that year of 1996. In 1998, there was a court case trying to ban smacking in Canada. As a response, the court system in Canada considered evidence on both sides from social sciences and from legal aspects more thoroughly than any country has ever done before or since. So they came out with a middle of the road position that was very much like the current law in Scotland but also restricted reasonable smacking between the ages of two and twelve inclusive. Consequently, since then, the trends in child abuse has decreased 40% in Canada whereas it increased by sixfold the next 15 years in Sweden when they had the most rigorously enforced smacking ban in the world. So I recommend that you look to Canada as the example to follow rather than Sweden. So thank you very much. Thank you, Professor. I'm going to ask individual members of the committee to introduce themselves before they ask their questions in case there's difficulty seeing the name please. Thank you very much, convener. Good afternoon, Professor Lars Lear. My name is Alex Cole-Hamilton. I'm a Liberal Democrat. I'm SP. I'm vice convener of the committee. Is it okay for me to launch into questions if you want everyone to introduce? Professor, would you define yourself as an academic? Yes, I've been a researcher, yes. Would you also agree that the academic standard worldwide in any discipline would be to present a hypothesis and then to test that hypothesis in empirical research or evidence that either proves or disproves that hypothesis? That's correct, and you want to try to do it as objectively as possible. Great. I ask that because you present a hypothesis in your submissions to this committee which I think is probably the most striking argument against a smacking ban that I have ever read and that is using the evidence of the Swedish example that you referenced the fact that between 1979 and 2010, when the ban was brought in in 1979, that Sweden has witnessed a 7,000 per cent increase in the number of juvenile rapes in that country or rapes by young people in that country. Although increased willingness to report rapes may have accounted for part of those increases, some of this 73-fold increase is likely because a small but increasing number of boys never learned to accept no from their mothers. It strikes me that the word likely is not very scientific and this is arguably the strongest argument we've heard against it. So what empirical evidence do you have to evidence the causality of the smacking ban and the increase of rapes in New Zealand? Yet the same interpretation problem as global warming. Global warming is up, the temperature planned earth is about up 7 per cent. As you correctly said, this is an increase of 7,000 per cent. But for global warming, the causal question is are human activities causing that increase and there are debates about that. That's not quite as clear. So the increase of these kind of... Now these are alleged... These are not substantiated, I don't have records of that, but these are alleged allegations of rapes, of children of the age of 15. Professor, forgive me, it's Ruth McGuire, the convener. You said that these are alleged and there is no record of them. Are you saying that the evidence you've presented is not based on recorded crime or recorded accusations of crime? Can you just be clear about that, please? Yes, thank you. These are criminal records in Sweden and they report in those records, these are allegations. So it's serious enough to have an allegation and the allegations of rapes in 1981 were 23 times as often allegations of rapes of children of the age of 15 in 2010 and some people say that that's because things are getting more reported but attempted rapes increased less than three-fold during that same time. So attempted rapes, allegations of that did not increase nearly as much as allegations of completed rapes against children of the age of 15. Thank you, convener, thank you, Professor. It strikes me that if this were true and there was empirical evidence to back this up, this would be the strongest argument that the pro-smacking lobby would have on a global stage to say that this is the wrong course of action and we should continue to allow parents to discipline their children. You've had nine years since these statistics were published to evidence that corollary between those reported rapes in 2010 and the smacking ban. We're not talking about millions of people here. Global warming is obviously a global issue. There are many factors. I don't suppose anyone around the room would disagree with mankind's responsibility for global warming but that's not what we're here to talk about. It's a much bigger issue that it's harder to get an empirical evidence base very swiftly from. With this, if this is the strongest argument in the pro-smacking lobby's arsenal why has there not been the research to say let's go and speak to the families of those people that were convicted of rape or accused of rape and ask about their parenting techniques? Why has that research not been undertaken? I don't know the answer to that question. I think it's an important question. So it's difficult to do research on parenting because you're more limited in being able to do the kind of randomized studies that would provide conclusive evidence. There is a little bit of that but most of the research is correlational which can't be as definite in terms of what is causing what. That's the problem I've been trying to at least improve upon in my 30-plus years of research on parental discipline of various kinds. So we can't draw a direct causal link between the smacking ban and an increase of rapes in Sweden? Well, if I were a parent in Scotland and I had a baby girl this next year I would want to be convinced that she would not be in the neck when she grew up it would only be a 10 times greater risk of being raped before she's 15 years of age. So I would want an answer to that question to be convinced that that's not going to happen in Scotland. So I have two adolescent boys or they're assumed to be adolescent, two boys. My wife and I have never hit them. Should we be anxious about their increased propensity to rape people? No. You and I are from better backgrounds. We have all the advantages. So our children do too. So we need to make sure that the conclusions we come to aren't just imposing our parenting perspectives on everybody else that doesn't have the advantages that we have. My research shows that if children are well-behaved or if their form of non-compliance is more negotiation then yes, all kinds of negative consequences including time-out as well as smacking are adverse. That doesn't help them. So well-managed children don't need smacking. But parents and kids who push the limits those are the ones where parents need something to back up the milder discipline tactics we all prefer when more defiant kids are pushing those limits and the milder things that we prefer aren't working for that particular child. Professor, it's the convener, Ruth Maguire. Your studies are cited by many people who are pro-physical punishment of children. You've given a couple of quite emotive examples there of why you think children should be physically punished. How would you reflect on the fact that as lawmakers we need to follow evidence and not emotional arguments when making legislation? What would your response to that be? I absolutely agree with that. Particularly in these areas of family law this is very important. There's a group called the Association for Family and Conciliation Courts in the United States that has realized particularly in family law this is a big problem. They call the problem scholar advocacy bias. That if research is used primarily to support just one side and isn't tried to be fair to all the evidence then that's going to be detrimental to the forming and the application of family law. So it's important to avoid scholarly advocacy bias and try to be as objective as possible in considering all the evidence across all perspectives. Professor, can I ask then for the record before you began your work on this topic were you neutral on the subject and it was the evidence that persuaded you or had you an opinion before you started? Let's see, I had an opinion before I started. I thought that since the vast majority of parents have smacked their children for many generations and the pendulum was swinging, that there were at least correlations that smacking was correlated with various things. My general hypothesis to start with was that it's possible that the best use of smacking would be beneficial if used only in appropriate ways only in appropriate conditions but obviously smacking can be misused and overused so that makes it look detrimental. So my main goal was to distinguish what all scientists need to distinguish what is the most effective form of any discipline tactic versus its ineffective and counterproductive ways and times of using them. Just to be very clear, before you began your research you were pro-physical punishment of children. I'm going to bring in the rest of the committee now. Professor, I'm going to stop here. We've got quite limited time so I'm going to invite questions from the rest of the committee and I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to... We do have a copy of your study so we have sight of it. Fulton MacGregor, you had a supplementary question. Fulton MacGregor, MSP, Kilbridge and Chrystian. Good afternoon, Professor. I do really appreciate you taking the time to speak to us today although I would have to say that I find some of your views expressed earlier quite uncomfortable but what I wanted to ask about was on Alex Cole Hamilton's point he quoted something back to you when you said that perhaps the increase in the offences in juveniles in Sweden was related to young boys particularly not being told no by their mother. Do you correlate being told no directly with physical punishment and violence? Now could you repeat that again, sir? So it's about parent boys not taking no for an answer from their mother and then not taking no from other people as well? Yes, so do you correlate... Sorry, but it's probably my accent, Professor. Do you correlate not being told no by a mother or a father or another caregiver being told no with physical violence? I'm not sure if this answers your question or not but part of my... When I hear comments from people I know are opposed to smacking but are good researchers then I take that account and I worked for people who were asked by the country of Norway to come and train all the therapists across Norway to help their parents manage their children's difficult behavior and they said they were surprised to find so many parents coming to them with problem children that just couldn't say no to anything because they understood the smacking ban there to mean they couldn't use any negative consequences of any kind so they couldn't say no to their children about the most reasonable things. So now that's from a top researcher in the field good enough to be recruited by the country of Norway to train parents how to discipline their children when they couldn't use smacking. They've been personally against smacking all their lives but they've noted this problem in that country that too many people feel, too many parents can't use any negative consequences whatsoever. I don't know if that answers... Sorry Professor, I think effectively what I'm asking is do you believe that the only effective way to say no to a young child is through physical punishment? But that's what your quote would seem to indicate. No, that's absolutely wrong. Like you and everyone the goal is for parents to use the mildest discipline tactic and the mildest reasonable interaction to resolve conflicts with their children. So the first plan is to use reasoning and to negotiate, find a mutually acceptable compromise to discipline problems. That should be the goal of all parents but when that doesn't work then that needs to be backed up by negative consequences especially with the most oppositional defiant young children. My research shows that reasoning works for preschoolers only if mothers back it up 10% of the time with some kind of negative consequences preferably time out and privilege removal. If that works, that's all the further that has to go and then the children learn to pay more attention to the reasoning. But it's those children who won't cooperate with even time out those are the ones for which the best research shows that smacking can be effective in enforcing cooperation with time out so the child will cooperate with this so then time out can be relied on to back up what a parent is trying to reason the child about. So that whole sequence is important and psychologists use that sequence when they're asked by parents help me manage my out of control child who qualifies for diagnoses called oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder then they train them to use time out and the best backup for time out according to their randomized studies is smacking and a brief room isolation those are the two most effective enforcement for time out that have been documented. Thank you, Professor. Mary Fee has a question. Thank you, convener, and good afternoon. Professor, my name is Mary Fee and I'm an MSP for West Scotland. You said in an earlier answer that you have based your views and opinions on research. There has been a significant amount of research that shows that children who are disciplined by use of physical force suffer negative outcomes whether that's antisocial behaviour, mental health problems or sometimes problems with substance abuse. Is that research you have looked at and have you discounted that research as having no credibility? My first study was like that that looked at correlations. So my conclusion, my first study was this. Most of the results of this study supported you that moderate physical punishment provides a training ground for violence. A training ground that differs from child abuse only by degree. That was my conclusion of my first study. This proves that I am biased in one direction or another. I'll read that again. Most of the results of this study support the view that moderate physical punishment provides a training ground for violence, a training ground that differs from child abuse only by degree. It's based on what are called cross-sectional correlations, concurrent correlations. But you can't tell what's leading to what. Is the aggression causing the children to be smacked more or is the smacking increasing aggression? So I have done, since then, in contrast to others, I have replicated the strongest effort against ordinary smacking. Professor, we're having a little difficulty hearing you. If there's a piece of paper over the microphone at your end or something, we're having trouble hearing you. Can you just make sure your microphone's clear? Thank you very much. Should I repeat anything? You don't need to repeat it. No, it was just a bit crackly. Since then, I've repeated the strongest causal evidence against ordinary smacking. But in contrast to others, I've also used that same data to see how do other alternatives that parents could use instead how do they look in those designs. And the results are the same for Ritalin, for non-physical punishment. So I replicate the strongest causal evidence against ordinary smacking. But non-physical consequences look just as harmful and if parents get professional help, then having their child see a psychotherapist or putting on Ritalin, those look just as harmful as smacking in the kind of research analyses that provide the strongest causal evidence against ordinary smacking. Professor, I'm sorry to interrupt you. The question I was trying to get at was there is a significant amount of research that has been done by respected academics into the effects that smacking a child can have. Did you look at that? I accept that you've done a huge amount of research yourself. But other pieces of research work that has been done by respected academics across the world, did you look at it and discount it? Or did you take any of it into account? I have done my very best to take all of it into account. So, for example, I've done the only review of the literature that focused on not just smacking but other alternatives that parents could use instead, published in 2005. To do that, I took all of... I've considered all the studies from Dr. Gershoff's first meta-analysis as well as all the studies in my earlier analyses, other reviews of literature so that I could fairly consider all of hers that qualified for that meta-analysis in 2005. And it found that the best way to use smacking was because the way psychologists used to train parents to use it to enforce... Professor, I realise this is a little bit awkward because it's quite hard to keep having to... because we can't see you. It's easier if you're in the building with us. I think... I'm going to bring back in Alex Cole-Hamilton who had some questions for you. Thank you, convener. Professor Llyr, it's Alex Cole-Hamilton again. My next round of questioning really follows on quite nicely from Mary Fees and your answer, your detailed answer there in terms of the efficacy of so-called backup smacking as a tool in the arsenal, if you like, of parenting, so that when normal parenting techniques fail, defiances continuous, then backup smacking can actually deliver that requirement. I just wonder... We recognise, though, that there are certain learning disabilities that children have which will not see developmental growth in the same way that children without those disabilities would have. They may not see the correlation between their behaviour and that physical punishment. They may never see that correlation and may continue to act defiantly. Would you support a partial ban on smacking for children with a diagnosed learning difficulty? I think that's an important question and I have not done research specifically on discipline of children with those kinds of disabilities. But I guess I would want to be very careful about having a ban for them because those kinds of bans have prevented the use of some of the most effective treatment programs in the past. I'm thinking of children who abuse themselves who just hit their heads against the wall until they're bleeding that in those cases at least some people felt that some use of punishment was effective at least for some of those. So I'd like to be very careful. Professor, can I just intervene there? It sounds like you're conflating physical punishment with restraint. I don't think any social care practitioner in this country certainly would use physical punishment as a tool to stop somebody harming themselves. I've tried to restrain them. Am I right that you're conflating those two things? That's correct that restraint would be a first option but if they go back to doing it as soon as they can't restrain them then that's not working. Some of the very good research at least researchers claimed and I've seen that evidence that at least in some cases smacking could be used to not for the I'm not an expert I haven't done this research myself but smacking was part of the most effective treatment for children who have this habit of abusing themselves. Thank you for that answer. So obviously with some medical conditions learning difficulties in particular whether that's acquired brain injuries or congenital defects that children will grow into adults yet their mental age will remain the same. Can you explain why we shouldn't liberalise the laws around physical punishment to allow us to use those techniques that you describe when adults with learning difficulties are harming themselves or are being defiant or outwardly violent? Now is the point of your question if we accept he's asking me to repeat if we accept that some people in this society will grow from children to adulthood and their mental age will remain at three or four and never advancing beyond that because of their condition. Is there a point at which we should as a society if we accept your argument that physical punishment is a necessary tool of control for them that there is a point at which they flip into adulthood and we can no longer hit them or should we be hitting adults with learning difficulties? Absolutely not. I do not specialise in research on people with disabilities. Let's see, but this is an issue for not just the research has shown that another research has shown that smacking is only adverse if it's continued past age nine or eleven and so so I think the benefit of the back-up smacking is it causes children to cooperate with minor discontactics like time-out so that smacking doesn't have to be used in the future. But if I may Professor Professor you're citing research it says it stops being effective after kids are nine, ten, eleven years old but that presupposes normal mental function if we're talking about people who are three-year-olds in adult bodies that doesn't apply to them surely. What I do know of that research with those kind of children and adults is that clear consequences are important. Positive consequences rewarding them and having things like time-out or I worked in an organisation that had what's called a token economy that had specific consequences to give privileges or take away privileges to teach them to use more appropriate behaviour and those are very effective with children with developing my disability that's not including smacking though. Thank you, Gail Ross. Thank you convener, good afternoon Professor Gail Ross MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross this bill just looks to give children equal protection with adults in the law and we hope if it passes the effect of cultural change as well and a lot of the evidence that we have already taken from experts in their field say that it would provide a clarity in the law that isn't currently there at the moment so if smacking is used as you would advocate as a backup form of punishment but you also mentioned misuse and there could also be the chance that it's used as the main form of punishment which also wouldn't be your stated aim and the privacy of the home how do we know that this is being adhered to? We don't but it's better to help parents to know how to use all their discipline tactics as effectively as possible rather than having blanket proscriptions of discipline tactics that have been used by most parents for many generations Now let's I think there was another part of your question that I've forgotten so what have I not answered? The people Sorry the people that say that they're looking for clarity and if it's used as a form of backup punishment I don't think they would say that that's giving any clarity Well it was clear enough that psychologists used to train parents of adult control children in that kind of smacking to backup time out so those defined children would cooperate with time out so it's there was very clear to them they prescribed and modeled two swaths of an open hand to the rear end when children wouldn't cooperate with the time out chair and used only in that situation when those defined children would not cooperate with time out they showed that when that happened consistently then the children didn't need to use smacking anymore Again to me that's a very clear prescription and so I think we need to discriminate between more less effective ways to use all discipline tactics Can you describe for the record if psychologists are advocating this as a form of being able to control unruly children what does smacking in that form look like is it back of the hand back of the legs one smack two more what's the recommended amount of smacking Well when psychologists trained parents to do that then the best reacher I know used two hard slaps of an open hand to the rear end only when children wouldn't cooperate with time out because they wanted a amount of discipline exactly like time out to be effective so they never had to use smacking but a study just came out this week of course people don't use the smacking back up anymore and they don't use the only alternative that's been shown to be as effective very often which is a brief room isolation but a study I just got from a Harvard professor this week is that now those treatments are half as effective as they were back when they used the smack back up for time out. Dr John Weiss and his colleagues from Harvard University published this week Professor Ruth McGuire convener can I just ask which professional psychological association advocates for two hard open handed strikes on the rear end of a child Well this is the problem of scholar advocacy bias that advocates want professional organizations to side with them sorry Professor I'm going to pause you there in your evidence the committee there you said that psychologists working with families to teach this method advocate to and your words were hard open handed strikes on the rear end of a child which professional association are these psychologists a member of there are no professional organizations that recommend that today for that reason but as half as effective as it was back when smacking was used a Harvard study that came out this week OK are you OK we have an additional question from the member proposing the bill John Finnie Good afternoon Professor and thanks very much for joining us it's been a very interesting evidence session with regard to the extensive research you've done and the conclusions you've reached if you're able to advise the committee when the optimum time is to start commencing striking a child hard with the open hand on the rear end what age frame? The research that shows that smacking is an effective enforcement for time out was done on children between the ages of two and six and that's where I can speak most confidently so I'm not sure how far to extend it beyond that I think two to twelve that the limits that Canada came up with is a reasonable one although in this country most mothers are smacking their children by 18 months so in the lack of research I would support mothers the majority of mothers rather than banning that until we have more evidence about how far to go beyond the ages of two to six certainly it should not be done for any children under the age of 12 months I clearly think that that should be banned that smacking should not be used of any kind for a child under the age of 12 months 12 months to 18 months certainly two hard smacks with the open hand on the rear end is appropriate Well one pediatrician talked about a child who got a habit of biting electrical cords plugged into a socket and apparently this the parents couldn't get her to stop that and so the pediatrician was saying shouldn't that child be smacked to prevent her from harming herself by biting an electrical wire plugged into a socket so that's one reason I don't want it to be completely criminalized but it should be discouraged I think up to the age of two years 24 months If the avoidance are doubt we would seek to discourage anyone from biting electrical cables at any age but I wonder if you can clarify whether in the course of your research you saw any benefits in the use of an implement for instance in discipling an 18 to 18 month a two year old Well the only in my summary of all the research I could find that examine not just smacking but alternatives physical punishment led to worse outcomes it was used too severely or as the primary means of this one and severely meant studies that were using implements so there's no evidence to support the use of implements to you to smack a child Now I would, I guess I would prefer there are some parents I know that see some advantage to that so personally I would be more comfortable with saying that parents can use an implement as long as it's not capable of inflicting more harm than the open hand like a newspaper for example rolled up newspaper OK, thanks for providing that clarity Professor, thank you That brings us to the end of our session Thank you Professor, I recognise the challenges in doing this type of Q&A down the line, I appreciate your time and the evidence that you've given Our next meeting will be on the 28th of March where we will take further evidence on the bill I now close the meeting