No, they don’t, they either grow up fearful of others, or they grow up believing that the way to solve problems is with violence. I don’t know what percentage of people in prison were abused as kids (and, yes, smacking IS child abuse), but I do know it’s very high. Hitting your child will make them fearful of you - and other adults - and will make them too scared to come to you for fear of your reaction.

The “feral” kids you see on the streets at all hours are probably there because they’re too scared to go home - ask me how I know. You don’t have the first fucking clue about what’s going on behind closed doors in those kids’ homes, you’ve just made the assumption that they’re being shitbags for the sake of it, because they want to be, perhaps they’re not being given any attention at all at home, so they’re acting out because any attention is better than being ignored.

Nobody’s born bad; violence is learnt behaviour and, if you’re dealing with a child or teenager who’s violent, then the first place you need to look for answers as to why is home, because I can almost guarantee that they’re either being abused (and, once again, smacking is abuse), or their parents simply don’t give a shit that they exist, kids who end up ‘in the system’ generally don’t come from loving homes.

Once again, hitting a child makes them fearful; hitting a child makes them scared; hitting a child makes them confused (“Mummy was kind to me this morning, why is she hurting me now…?”), hitting a child means that, when something bad happens to them, they’ll be scared to tell anyone in case they get in trouble. Hitting a child leaves them traumatised - any parent who can’t discipline their child without resorting to physical violence, deserves to lose them.

My parents hit me frequently - and not only my parents, the nuns at school, too; when I was six, I was raped by the curate at my parents’ local church, I told them, and I was belted five ways to Sunday by my father for “lying”. They didn’t believe me. I’ve carried that pain with me for over 30 years, I don’t think I’ll EVER get over the trauma - so fuck you; fuck you for advocating for violence against children and fuck you for dredging up something I’ve tried to keep buried.

If you think violence against kids is okay, then that speaks volumes about you as a person and makes me wonder what your childhood was like. Any caregiver, be they a parent, teacher, childminder, whoever, who physically chastises a child, should IMMEDIATELY lose the right to have any contact with that child until they’ve learnt how to teach them right from wrong without resorting to violence.

HITTING A CHILD IS NOT OKAY - EVER!