Smacking children remains legal in NI as amendment is not selected

Proposals to make smacking children illegal have been dropped from new laws making their way through the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Some say a ban would have offered young people legal protection against assault, while others say such a change would have criminalised parents.

Striking a child is outlawed in Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland.

While there have been calls for smacking to be banned, it remains legal in England and Northern Ireland.

The Justice Bill proposes "significant reforms" that include changes to bail and custody arrangements for children and improved services for victims and witnesses.

Several amendments have been attached and selected for debate - but the one that called for a ban on smacking children has been dropped.

The bill was introduced to the assembly in September 2024.

Michelle Guy of the Alliance Party proposed an amendment abolishing the defence of "reasonable punishment", which is available to parents and caregivers in some circumstances.

By the time the bill came to be debated in the chamber, Guy's amendment was not selected by the Speaker.

A coalition of children's rights organisations, health professional bodies, charities, and community and voluntary sector groups, the Equal Protection Working Group, expressed "profound disappointment".

It added that the amendment would have "brought Northern Ireland into line with international human rights standards and ensured that children have the exact same legal protection from physical assault as adults".

The coalition said it was "unclear" as to why the amendment was not selected.

"In our view, the amendment fell within the scope of the bill, and it would have allowed elected representatives the opportunity to consider and debate this important issue," it said.

An Assembly spokesperson said it is for the Speaker to select amendments based on a range of issues "from a procedural perspective and the decisions of the Speaker are not subject to challenge".

There is a longstanding parliamentary convention that the Speaker does not give reasons for decisions.

"143 amendments were tabled to the Justice Bill. The Speaker selected 132 amendments from the minister, committee and individual members from different parties on a large range of issues," the Assembly spokesperson added.

Michelle Guy said: "What we're trying to achieve here is to ensure that children have the same protection in law against assault as adults already do.

"Right now in Northern Ireland there is a legal defence available that you can physically punish children in some circumstances.

"The change that I was hoping to see through the amendment would have repealed that legal defence. It would not have created a new criminal offence and that's really important."

Guy said parents can still discipline in the home and still set boundaries.

She said that while the amendment was not selected for the Justice Bill, "the most realistic prospect for this to get done would be a private member's legislation but that will have to happen at the earliest in the next mandate".

"What we're trying to say is not criminalising loving parents, we're trying to make sure there isn't a legal defence that abusive parents can hide behind."

Northern Ireland's Children's Commissioner, Chris Quinn, agrees.

"We will keep continuing to make these recommendations because Northern Ireland is an outlier," he said.

"It's really mind-boggling to me as to why we don't want to give children the full protection that they ought to have and it's a widely supported campaign.

"We recognise that children need boundaries. Children need positive discipline and they need, they need to be able to de-escalate when things get stressful. But parents need support."

But not everyone agrees.

The DUP's justice spokesperson Paul Frew said: "I think that if a system's not broken, why try to fix it? I think that parents have enough to be dealing with without the state encroaching on things like this.

"I believe it would criminalise parents, and I think the state will do well to stay out of what is a debate about good parenting.

"If you're going to ban smacking effectively, are we going to band grounding children because you're taking away the freedom? You're incarcerating children."

Frew said there is "no manual" on how to parent and what is good parenting and bad parenting.

He said the police need to be "concentrating on what's crime, and not crime, and detecting crime, and investigating crime".

"I think this would also lead to an influx of reports against parents that the police then would be duty bound to investigate.

"I think common sense would go out the window."

Simon Calvert, Deputy Director of the Christian Institute said: "It's important to recognise that all physical abuse is already illegal.

"The reasonable chastisement defence protects parents from unfair prosecution over very minor, reasonable actions, like a mum tapping a toddler on the back of the hand to stop them reaching for an electrical socket - the kind of thing most of us experienced as kids from parents who loved us.

"Repealing the defence would, by definition, make this kind of reasonable parental behaviour prosecutable."

"Criminalising reasonable parenting decisions does not help genuinely abused children – it simply ties up police and social services with investigating good parents, leaving them less time to focus on the kids who really need their help."

In 2015, the Republic of Ireland banned smacking children.

Jersey was the first part of the British Isles to ban smacking in April 2020.

Scotland became the first part of the UK to outlaw physical punishment of under-16s with a ban on parents smacking their children becoming law in 2020.

Wales followed suit in 2022 but in Northern Ireland and England it is still legal.