Taking it on the chin for smacking her children

Published on Saturday 28 August 2004 00:02

IN the four months she has been in the job, Scotland’s first children’s commissioner has become no stranger to political controversy, angering family campaigners, teachers and even her government employers.

Arguably the most contentious issue has been Kathleen Marshall’s support for an outright ban on smacking - an idea dropped by the Scottish Executive, but which she has put back on the agenda.

However, in an interview with The Scotsman, Ms Marshall, 51, admitted she had smacked her own children while bringing them up and expressed her feelings of guilt at doing so.

Family groups which support smacking said they thought it was "strange" that Ms Marshall wanted to criminalise her own actions as a parent.

However the commissioner, who has three children now in their mid-twenties, said she used her own experiences to convince others not to physically punish their children.

"I’ve been quite open about that at conferences. I immediately go into defensive mode and say it was a wee smack," Ms Marshall said. "I sometimes thought about it, was it right, but it was what you were expected to do. It was almost as if you weren’t doing the right thing if you didn’t.

"People start asking: ‘Is this woman coming to tell us we are child abusers and our parents were child abusers?’. If it comes out that I was in the same position and I’m not being self-righteous and it’s not a condemnation of this generation or past generations, [then] it’s a challenge to us, can we do something better for our children?"

She said she become a convert to the anti-smacking cause while working at the Scottish Child Law Centre about 15 years ago. "I just asked the question and somebody said: ‘You don’t have to do this’. It was a tremendous relief."

Ms Marshall said people were gradually accepting that smacking was wrong. "Attitudes have changed since 1989. People used to think you were talking a load of nonsense and smacking was a positively good thing or certainly did no harm. Nowadays people will say they realise it’s not good to smack, but what they are afraid of is the implications of making it illegal, afraid of ordinary parents being prosecuted. But the physical punishment debate is about giving children the same right to protection as adults. Minor assaults against adults are not prosecuted."

The commissioner, who has degrees in law, philosophy and theology, said she was not a campaigner or a lobbyist but a "watchdog", seeking to implement a UN convention on children’s rights which the UK signed up to in 1991. "When our country accepted the convention it made promises to children to do certain things to make it better for them. That’s why my job is here, my job is to move towards better implementation of it. It’s not that I sit here making subjective judgments."

The Family Education Trust has led the campaign to preserve the right to parental smacking. Its director, Norman Wells, said: "It’s a very strange thing that she should want to criminalise parents for doing what the children’s commissioner in Scotland herself did.

"She may say now that she regrets it or doesn’t think it was right, but is she really saying it would have benefited her and her children to be in court with her children testifying against her? I doubt she would say that. Would it really be in the interests of her children to have a major social services investigation and her children placed on the ‘at risk’ register? It’s just crazy. No doubt she would say if there had been a law it would have had a restraining effect."

Mr Wells even questioned the need for a children’s commissioner. "The main argument put in favour of having one in Scotland and also England is the idea that children need a champion, a strong independent voice," he said. "We would say the vast majority of children have two champions and those who don’t normally have one. The vast majority have a parent who is better equipped to care for their child’s interest than any impersonal, bureaucratic office will be. She wants to impose her view by force of law and that, I would suggest, is an abuse of her position."

However, the Scottish Conservative’s education spokesman, James Douglas-Hamilton, said that while he disagreed with a smacking ban, Ms Marshall was doing a good job.

Ms Marshall became embroiled in controversy only last weekend when she was reported to have said teachers should not shout at children - unless it was to be heard above a noisy class - though she insisted she meant "abusive and humiliating" shouting.

Pat O’Donnell, Scottish secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: "She was saying we should not be verbally aggressive, but she hadn’t thought through carefully enough the way she phrased it."

A government apparatchik whose job is to look after children - or at least their rights - Ms Marshall might be said to epitomise the "nanny state".

But she said: "There are negative connotations with that image. Is it a Mary Poppins-type or a stiff-starched matron? I wouldn’t mind being Mary Poppins, that would be quite good."

However, given the sensitive nature of her job, she may need more than a mere spoonful of sugar to help a sometimes reluctant nation swallow her medicine.

FROM TOUGH ESTATE TO CHILD TSAR

KATHLEEN Marshall grew up on the tough Fairhill estate in Hamilton and witnessed some of her young neighbours being taken into care.

She was bright at school and was bullied as a result. She also experienced corporal punishment, getting the belt for looking out of the window while walking to the teacher’s desk to hand in her jotter, for scoring less than seven out of ten in a Latin test, and for failing to miss out a line between the title of an essay and the words.

In her fourth year, she decided to refuse to accept the belt again, but was never able to test her resolve as the situation did not arise again.

After school, she studied law at Glasgow University and went on to work for the city council as a clerk to various committees, becoming an expert in European directives on pigeons and the Dogs Act of 1906 among other topics.

Mrs Marshall quit her job to become a full-time mother at the age of 24. Initially the family moved quite frequently following her husband’s work as an engineer to England, California and Switzerland, with one child born in each country.

They returned to live in the upmarket Glasgow suburb of Newton Mearns in 1985 and have stayed there ever since. Mrs Marshall said the house was "chosen entirely with the children in mind".

Eleven years later, she decided the children were old enough for her to return to work. She spent time as a voluntary bereavement counsellor before taking up an unpaid post at the Scottish Child Law Centre in 1988.

She became co-director and then the sole director of the centre, but left in 1994 as the centre expanded and she realised she would rather deal with the issues than become a manager.

Since 1994 Mrs Marshall has acted as a consultant, providing advice, research, training and assistance to universities, central, local and foreign governments and voluntary agencies.

She has written and spoken extensively on children’s issues and served on a number of bodies concerned with the rights of children. She chaired the Edinburgh Inquiry into Abuse and Protection of Children in Care, which reported in 1999.

As well as law, she has degrees in philosophy and theology and is a practising Christian. She wrote a book called Honouring Children: The human rights of the child in Christian perspective with Edinburgh-based theologian Dr Paul Parvis.

The Children’s Commissioner post comes with a salary of 72,000 and her contract is for five years, with the possibility of one further term of five years.

Her eldest son is 26, has a degree in neuroscience from Oxford University and is working on an internet television project. Her other son is a 25-year-old maths graduate who is currently "more interest in his rock band". Her 23-year-old daughter studied at Bradford University and works in career services there.

IAN JOHNSTON