Jeff Buckley

Like many people, I've been listening to and thinking about Jeff Buckley a lot this last week. Thanks to C4 for their Buckley coverage last weekend.

If JB isn't a character in your world then go here for an introduction. What an incredible loss. Elliott Smith has meant more to me personally over the years (I saw ES once - he was terrible! An amazing recording artist and writer tho'.), but it's clear that JB had more gifts than him, probably more than anyone else. His voice and guitar playing had a special freedom... a pop-folk Coltrane (who died at 40) perhaps. How sad that JB never got to make his Love Supreme or Blue Train. That was coming. Grace isn't it, it's a great, bitsy, light-the-blue-touchpaper kind o' record, exciting for what it is but much more so for what it portends... in a future that was never realized. Too damn bad.

Der Siebente Kontinent

Michael Haneke is one of my favorite film directors - he's an almost perfect mixture of Kubrick and Hitchcock as far as I'm concerned. I just watched his 1989 film, The Seventh Continent. It's superb.
It was interesting to see that Haneke's style and aesthetic were already perfectly formed almost 20 years ago, and it was also interesting to see certain original shots turn up that were stolen/copied/emulated by other directors, Egoyan, Moll, etc. throughout the '90's. The film itself is haunting and brilliant and almost indescribable. Highly Recommended.

Trouble Brewing?

I like young actress Evan Rachel Wood a lot. She's stenciled into my mind from a dozen or more astonishing scenes in Thirteen. Her final scream over the top of the great Liz Phair song "Explain it to me" at the end of the film is a particular keeper. (You may know her as the heartland girl-friend in Green Day's "When September Ends" video.) I like Marilyn Manson quite a lot too, at least when I'm a certain mood.

But I can't say that I'm thrilled about them as an item. Almost everyone has a disastrous, too-intense relationship in college, say. But with someone 20 years older? With Mr Manson? And with death-obsessed, explicit videos such as this not safe for work classic? I know Wood is an actress and that she's a legal adult - if she's old enough to vote, to go fight in Iraq, and all the rest of it then she's old enough to make her own wretched relationship mistakes (if that's what they are). Still, if she were my sister, I'd be concerned... It's weird to feel oneself disturbed by something so far away, and in the grand scheme of things so unimportant and so "none of my business". But our general relationship to ingenue-ish, female movie stars is that we do end up having vaguely protective feelings for them... They were selected for their roles because of their hyper-neotenic features, their impossibly perfectly pristine skin, their supreme openness to the camera..... and we buy them in that capacity. We're right there with them in our imaginations. We love Audrey Hepburn and feel very protective of her... and we want her to be happy, for the world not to defile her, etc. much as we would wish those things for a member of our own family. Evan Rachel Wood isn't the new Audrey H. - no one is - but she works the same part of our celebrity/vicarious emotional musculature (just as Katie Holmes did - hence the grief that Mr Cruise copped). She's our kid sister and we hope like hell things aren't going to hell for her.

S 59 Debate: Replying to Anon

My April 25 post has launched what I take to be an interesting exchange between myself and one Anon. Anon's first comment is here. Anon's remarks are both penetrating and very well-expressed. I want to thank her for that, and I urge anyone who's still interested in thinking clearly about this issue to read what she has to say there.
This post is just my latest reply to Anon - one that grew and seemed silly left as a comment. I include all of Anon's most recent comment in green type and in order.

You state that, basically, there is no evidence that you know of that smacking causes positive outcomes for children but there is a bit of evidence that there is a correlation between smacking and negative things. Therefore, wouldn't the most appropriate thing to have happen be to ban smacking?

No. For three reasons.

1. Much more evidence is needed on the negative side. The (plausibly) causally interpretable negative stuff is relatively limited at this point: just a single study by Grogan-Kaylor (G-K). At the very least one would want to see that study followed up with more nuanced anti-social-behavior-score (ASBS) dependent variables that clearly separated inside and outside the home behaviors. Moreover, G-K's study is limited in ways that any one study tends to be. Consider that in the overall population from which G-K gets his sample data the ASBSs are normed to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. G-K's basic result from his sample is that (controlling for an impressive amount of stuff) smacking boosts ASBSs by 2-3 points on this scale - i.e., by roughly a 1/4 of a standard deviation. That's then a conclusion he wants us to infer as holding about the whole population from which his sample is drawn and beyond that to kids everywhere. But then we want/need to know how representative his sample of 1800 kids is. Well, his sample had initial mean ASBS of 106.9. That's a little odd. First, the sample's skew from the population norm is double the final difference that's identified as smacking-related and then claimed to be inferable back to the whole population. I think that at the very least this confirms that the effect that G-K identified can't be particularly serious. Insofar as half-a-SD change in mean ASBS doesn't destroy representativeness of the sample to that extent a boost of 1/4-of-a-SD keeps one well within the normal variation range by the study's own lights. In this way, at least on one level, G-K's study partially undermines itself as a basis for any recommendations.
Second, and addressing representativeness directly, the standard error of the mean in a sample of 1800 is SD(population)/sq.root(1800) = .353. That means 95% of (N=1800) sample means should be in the range 100±.71 i.e., within two standard errors of the population mean. G-K's sample has a mean that's almost 20 standard errors away from the population mean - it's a hugely improbable, 1-in-a-bazillion, unrepresentative sample. That can be OK. There may be good reasons for having such an exceedingly un-random sample but it does mean that the otherwise very respectable sample size of 1800 doesn't mean what it would if the sample was random. Some quick calculations show that for G-K's sample mean of 106.9 to be within two standard errors of the population mean his sample would have to have roughly N=20. Wow. Does this sort of technical point matter? I'm not sure. I don't like it, but I'm hardly impartial. I do think, however, that this is the sort of technical point that usually only really gets settled by further studies with more representative samples. Conclusion: Needs more study.
For another example, G-K's sample of 1800 kids was coded as 80% no corporal punishment (cp) and only 20% having different positive numbers of cp events in a particular week. Is that a problem for the study or not? I don't know, but it concerns me that, after you control for a few things (e.g., child sex, age, and initial ASBS and family per-capita-income) then the number of individual smacked kids that are being compared at each controlled-for point gets very small (assume just 4 control factors and just 10 levels for each of those and you're down to, on average, 9 smacked kids in each comparison class. And all of that's with setting aside our earlier worries about unrepresentativeness. (Once I've studied up on a few statistical software matters a bit more, I intend to ask G-K for his raw data so I can investigate this properly.) Again, the big conclusion has to be: Needs More Study.

And, look, 1990's Medicine was full of cases in which exactly G-K's analytical tools – so-called fixed effects models – were applied to broadly observational data and they suggested conclusions that were nonetheless completely reversed when proper randomized trials were run. E.g., people eating more fruits and vegetables, which are rich in ß carotene, and people having higher serum ß carotene concentrations were observed to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Fixed effects models then identified the ß carotene as the causally relevant factor. But when people went out and tested efficacy of ß carotene supplements the results were horrifying. In trials where participants randomised to ß carotene supplements were compared with those randomised to placebo, ß carotene supplementation moderately boosted risks of cardiovascular death and carcinogenesis (e.g, here). At the time, this sort of nasty surpise led to a lot of handwringing in clinical medicine and epidemiology about fixed effects models and meta-analyses more generally. Were they valuable as guides to what randomized trials to run in future ("Meta-analysis, schmeta-analysis" was the memorable title of one review paper!)? And, heaven forbid that they were an autonomous basis for drawing serious conclusions and a substitute for actually doing the randomized trials! But in social science where randomized trials are impossible or unethical or both, we're supposed to take our marching orders from such studies and go full steam ahead, no questions asked! It ticks me off that Anne Smith et al. down at U.Otago take this line, and that Cindy Kiro would just parrot it. Sorry, that's unconscionable and I can't be party to it. The only serious conclusion remains: Needs more study.

2. Positive side needs more time to develop. G-K's study only came out a couple of years ago, and it's fair to say that, although it's nowhere near bulletproof as I've just argued, it has raised the bar in the area (which should tell you something about how ineffectual most of the other research on the topic is - see my discussions here and here), and there now needs to be a period during which that research is consolidated/confirmed and alternatives explored and if possible excluded. It would be fairly shocking if it were true that there are no good effects from smacking under any circumstances. I'm prepared to believe that that's so... but not yet! I can't stress enough how narrow the base of casually interpretable negative results is... those results might be able to be importantly reversed just by finding another set of outcomes to check for/measure as the dependent variable. The fairly nasty social and personal trends that have accompanied the decline of smacking over the last 50 years suggests that outside-the-home might be the place to look for (now much weakened!) positive effects (at least in some sub-populations). But I admit it's hard to know even what to measure.... These are big research challenges, I think.

3. Don't Ban. Inform. Even if the negative effects case went from strength to strength and the positive effects case never panned out at all then unless the negative effects in question are huge, which they aren't as far as we know (see point 1 above), I tend to think that the right move is to just give parents the relevant data.... Compare: some parents doubtless don't feed their kids especially well... still one doesn't want to criminalize giving kids coke or chips etc.. (Although perhaps that's something Sue Kedgeley will want to explore! Dear God let's hope not! But illiberalism abhors a vacuum of freedom...) Or if divorce or sole parenthood has predictably mildly negative effects on kids.... well, while people should be told about any data to this effect, systematically penalizing divorcees or sole parents through family law, let alone criminalizing them seems completely inappropriate. The criminal law and probably law more generally just seems to be the wrong instrument with which to address the sort of arguable, localized sub-optimality that all manner of parenting and life decisions tend to involve. The good news from psychology that I referred to in my last comment is that kids are remarkably resilient and almost distressingly impervious to our efforts to influence and nurture them. Babies seem to develop roughly the same personalities, IQs etc. regardless of what you do or don't do at home, and of who (e.g., biological or adoptive parents) raises them. Ndugu in his mud hut ends up just as visually acute and as smart as genetically comparable little Susie from Mirimar with her room full of allegedly brain-expanding mobiles and pretty pictures. (Most of what you can do to influence your kid's development is chose the neighborhood/school/out-of-home environments in which he or she grows up. Susie's ultimate advantage over Ndugu will largely consist in this. Judith Rich Harris's books are invaluable sources of references on this sort of stuff.) That's part of what makes official equanimity about diversity of family arrangements possible I think. But then tolerance of different parenting styles - styles that are as different as jazz is from rock or as classical is from blue-grass - with attitudes to discipline and rules and duties and consequences being a major variable generating that diversity, should I believe be part of that.

You also state something along the lines of, 'perhaps we're both too self-conscious and reflective to ever be fully successful-convincing smackers'. This implies that there are parents out there that are less self-conscious and reflective than us, which there is. I am not of the opinion that I am excessively self-conscious or reflective but am just trying to do the best by my child. Therefore, do you not think that there should be a ban on smacking until the vast majority of parents here in New Zealand are more self-conscious and reflective?

Parents, and people more generally differ quite a lot, both in their personalities and in their situations. I'm a hyper-verbal, high-stress, lots-of-regrets sort of person (e.g., I'm always amazed when I hear people say they have no regrets about anything - I always respond internally "Wow, then I guess I have nothing in common with you then!"). There are lots of advantages to being someone like me but many disadvantages too. Many people are much more practical and solid and down-to-earth, more "hands on", and doubtless more comfortable in their own bodies than me. I suspect that that's the kind of difference that probably does make a difference with respect to smacking and who it's gonna work best (or at all) for. And I simply don't see any reason why everyone should be expected to converge on my mindset and personality with its associated squeamishnesses and liabilities. Reflectiveness etc. at least to anything like the degree I have it is a slightly odd phenomenon and should not be a requirement for anything much! Vive la difference.
Note that one reason that randomized trials for behaviors are essentially impossible (as well as being unethical) is precisely because the behavior as an action of yours has to make sense from your perspective. If you as a non-smacker get assigned to the smacking group in our trial, say, then that's not just gruesome for you, you really don't believe in it and then there's absolutely no reason to believe that you can fake it convincingly or completely over-come your internal self-selection against that group and what it represents.
During the smacking debate I often heard hyper-verbal types saying "Wow, I'm amazed that anyone could ever smack a child, I guess I have nothing in common with such people!" In my view that's entirely analogous to my finding people who never have "regrets" somewhat unintelligible. The beginning of wisdom in both cases seems to be to force oneself to see that there could be advantages to not being like oneself and to having a society where not everyone had the same instincts or personality or way of being in the world. I'm an atheist and deep down find it very mysterious that theists should believe the things they do. But with a little effort I can see that there might be serious advantages to believing that there's a meaning behind everything (or whatever core theistic commitments boil down to). Too bad that that's apparently not an option for me then. (Of course if you're Richard Dawkins, you'll regard that kind of open-mindedness with suspicion, think all religious up-bringing is child-abuse pure and simple!) And so on. I think this basically answers your question, but maybe it just raises further questions...

A lot of people are of the opinion that the Bill is like the Government trying to tell parents how to raise their children. It's not really like that when it comes down to it, but it is just placing a limit on what parents can do to control their children, which is obviously completely understandable.

Well there was a limit before - reasonableness - and a range of clarifications and tightenings of that limit were offered and all were rejected.... so it's wrong to suggest that Bradford's Bill merely draws a limit, rather it's a very specific zero-tolerance policy/prohibition that (setting aside various indeterminacies) makes every smacker at least an unindicted criminal. In that sense it expresses the view that insofar as you correct your child by smacking them to that extent you're a bad parent, regardless of what the big picture is about your parenting, and indeed regardless of what good smacking may be doing the child (perhaps because the negative evidence is ultimately going to melt away or maybe just because your child is anomalous in some important respects, and with all your special detailed private knowledge of your child you can see that that is so). That's fairly highhanded and controlling in my view. Punishing parents who take their kids to McDonalds (zero-tolerance for coke and chips for kids) or who don't breast feed or who circumcise or who give their kids a religious up-bringing would seem to be able to justified in exactly the same ways. And that's a bit of a nightmare.
I must say that the insensitivity of the left on this sort of point simply astounded me. The kicker for me was the following passage from the Select Committee report that was supposed to address the practical worry (which never concerned me much) that parents might be prosecuted for assault willy-nilly if S 59 were repealed:

"We note that there are several potential offences directly related to the care of children that are rarely prosecuted. Such an example is if a caregiver sends a child to its room against its will, this technically constitutes kidnapping under section 209 of the Crimes Act. However, the police are not regularly prosecuting parents for this."

Even setting aside the bizarro world we've entered when one insists on thinking that kidnapping applies, even in principle, to paradigmatic exercises of parental authority, the basic move here is simply nightmarish for its intended audience. It's not at all reassuring to someone who thinks that losing S 59 amounts to an invasion of their home to hear the govt say, "Of course, technically, we could get you for kidnapping any time..." Compare: telling someone who's bugged by your latest hate-speech law, say, "Don't worry about the hate-speech law since, technically, we could do you for sedition any time..." In both cases, the basic picture is incredibly troubling: a government is arrogating to itself control in principle over every aspect of human life. Every aspect of your life is being gathered into govt hands/made indictable and only then granted back to you, by its leave. That stinks. I suspect that every time Clark or Bradford recycled the kidnapping point in interviews thereafter Bradford's Bill rightly lost another couple of points of public support. (The kidnapping point was actually legally incorrect as well with S 59 on the books. S59 makes correction no offense not just not-an-assault - see here for more on this point.) It was a classic case of the tone deaf left having absolutely no ability to understand (or interest in understanding) any sensibility other than its own.

Let me explain things from my side a bit more: without a ban on smacking, children are subjected to smacking at times when it is inappropriate, being smacked too much, being smacked for accidents like spilling milk, being smacked because the parent is angry or frustrated with other aspects of their life such as their work, those kinds of things.

I discuss this sort of worry here. I agree that parents are going to make mistakes of various sorts, but am not bugged by that too much. Angry, inconsistent parenting is another thing entirely. It is, I take it, paradigmatic bad parenting, and to be deplored. But that's a problem whether smacking is in the picture or not.

Until there is an appropriate checks-and-balances system put in place, not even light smacking should occur legally.

I'm not sure what you have in mind by "checks-and-balances". Neighborhood parent juries to which parents can appeal and ask to issue special time-limited smacking licences? (Anti-smacking researcher M. Straus once suggested that birth certificates should have "Warning: can be harmed by smacking" printed on them by analogy with govt. warnings printed on cigarette packets!) Or are you referring to utopias in which there are no more bad- or even any less-than-ideal or parents?

The View From 1932

A fairly standard, e.g., here and here, broad-brush way of understanding the 20th Century holds that the main line of world economic development (via the formation of global supply chains, communications networks, relative borderless markets for both labor and capital, and comparative advantage working on the grandest possible scale) came to a screeching halt with the outbreak of WW1 in 1914 only to restart with a vengeance in 1989-1990. See

• Niall Ferguson, Sinking Globalization
• Carl Strikwerda, Globalization at the Crossroads

I'm starting to wonder whether there aren't larger cultural continuities with that pre-WW1 period. For example, Darwinism/nature is back big-time, and nurture (and some of the utopian social theorizing that went with it) is history. Is there anything else like that? Got any thoughts? links?

Just got around to renting V for Vendetta. I was shocked: it's tedious, (cinematically and otherwise) illiterate trash. Avoid (the cartoon Road to Serfdom can be read in under 5 minutes, has more content, and is better looking). Sin City is the only successful (and, be warned, sick-as-hell) graphic-novel/artsy comic-book film adaptation in my view.

Public Address: Ape-like Chest-beating 2

1. Consider the following from Russell Brown:

'Perhaps I've missed some comments, but I've been struck by the way that [Simon] Barnett, who rarely misses a chance to remind us of his parenting credentials, has equally rarely granted that the present law needs changing at all, despite it being absolutely evident that a great many kids suffer much more than the "light smacking" that has become the most overused catchphrase of the whole debate.
Yes, Mr Barnett, we understand that you only ever smack your children briefly, lightly and lovingly, but it would be nice to hear you condemn parents who believe they have a legal and moral right to thrash their kids on a regular basis. The fact that you don't - and instead seem to regard society taking an interest in those homes where those thrashings take place as a much greater evil - makes me think ill of you.
Some pretty weird people have been drawn to the flame of this bill. And that was no doubt in John Key's mind when he made his decision. He'd wound up on the same side as the moral conservatives, the angry and resentful, the.....' (my italics)

I haven't kept especially close tabs on Simon Barnett's views but my general sense is that Barnett was happy with anything that didn't criminalize people such as himself, and that he certainly could have lived with something like the Borrows Amendment or NSW's S 61AA. Once that bare criminality issue was off the table I'd further guess that Barnett would be happy to support "positive parenting" or "anti-thrashing" education/promotion or whatever it might be.
The point, however, is that it's not just psychologically understandable for Barnett to focus on his own (sort of) case, it's also logically fair for him to do so.

Bradford, Brown, et al. are trying to ban something and as I've pointed out before, that imposes obligations on them that opponents such as Barnett do not share. If you want to ban almost all abortions, say, then you have to explain (roughly) why (almost) all abortions are bad/banworthy. That means you have to front up to relatively ideal aborters – women who were young, broke, in a horrid relationship, as objectively "barely able to look after themselves", "not close to being ready to be parents" as you want, etc.. You have to explain to them why what they did was bad and shouldn't be allowed. You don't get to focus on what are for you (i.e., the banner) the easy cases: people who have 5 or more abortions, people who have arguably very frivolous abortions (because it would interfere with skiing dah-ling), or whatever it is. And you certainly don't get to have that latter focus if, as the debate develops, you go on to dismiss various pro-choice compromises that are designed, however awkwardly, to address your alleged concerns about super-aborters and frivolous aborters (e.g., lifetime limits on abortions, anti-frivolity counseling, etc.). If you dismiss all such offers/compromises then you've absolutely clarified that you're not opposed to frivolous-abortion or routinized-abortion or whatever it is in particular, rather you think abortion is bad/banworthy in general. OK then, now you have to face up to the relatively ideal cases.... And you absolutely must not make a Brownian move as follows:

'Perhaps I've missed some comments, but I've been struck by the way the ideal aborters rarely grant that the present law needs changing at all, despite it being absolutely evident that there are all these super-aborters and frivolous aborters out there.... Yes Ms Ideal Aborter, we understand that you only abort rarely and seriously, but it would be nice to hear you condemn those who aren't so scrupulous. The fact that you don't - and instead seem to regard society taking an interest in the super-aborters etc. as a much greater evil - makes me think ill of you.'

If you make a move of this kind you reveal yourself to be a contemptible, equivocating demagogue. Or at least a dick.

2. One of the most irritating features of Public Address's coverage of S 59 matters is its insistence that only nutjobs or worse really might have any problems with Bradford's bill. One of Barnett's strongest points is his ability to remind people that this is a distortion both by his example and by his astute quotation of people. Most of what I know about Barnett comes from this story. There Barnett nicely remarks:

"Dr Cullen said, `This bill is opposed by religious fanatics and extremists, as well as other various forms of strange people.' I just think that is extremely arrogant, given that the Colmar Brunton poll had 83% of New Zealanders were against it."

PA's line is the same as Cullen's with the added fillip of arguing that the polls are meaningless didn't ya know? Barnett is absolutely correct to call Cullen on his arrogance and general divorce from reality here. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of PA.

3. Long-time readers of PA will have some sense of what's going on. It may be useful to review how Brown performed the last time one of these controversial pieces of legislation came down the pike....Cast your mind back to March 2005. The Relationships (Statutory References) Bill (later Act, RSRA) was wending its way through select committee. There are massive problems with how de facto couples and relationships more generally are treated in that Bill and in its predecessor the Property (Relationships) Act, and a spirited and intelligent campaign had forced the Select Committee led by Tim Barnett to concede the point. Go here for the Herald's report on the press conference at the time at which Tim Barnett said that the Bill would be changed in response to some of those concerns and that the Law Commission would be asked to reflect further on the deeper questions that had been raised, and that had proved more than the select committee itself could handle. The trouble is that despite Tim Barnett's statements at that press conference, no changes were made to the Bill/Act after the select committee reported back, and 2 years after the RSRA became law, the Law Commission still hasn't received the terms of reference for their further report. (The Law Commission announced a forthcoming report, pending receipt of terms of reference in March 2005. This report was then dropped from their work schedule in June after no terms were received.)
Here's Russell Brown flakking for Tim Barnett after that press conference:

The select committee recommendations on the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill ought to mollify the concerns of most critics - and if it doesn't, it would be fair to wonder what their motives are in the first place. Clear daylight has been established between the rights and obligations attached on one hand to marriage and civil unions, and on the other to de facto relationships. The language used to refer to civil unions is now to be clearly distinct from that referring to marriage. Also, the gnarlier questions on treatment of de facto relationships will be referred to the Law Commission before the final bill is drafted. (my italics)

But the "clear daylight" (about intestate succession and a few other things) Brown mentions never actually made it into the Act - the Bill passed unchanged - and, as I mentioned, the Law Commission's action on "gnarlier questions" that Brown asserted would happen before the Bill was passed, i.e., before the end of March 2005, hasn't occurred as of May 2007. As far as I know, Brown has never followed up on this. Apparently impugning people's motives (Brown means to insinuate that critics of the RSRA are anti-gay) is more fun.
Tim Barnett lied pretty seriously in my view, and Brown flakked for him most egregiously. Then we were into an election cycle etc., crucial members of select committees changed, game over.

4. Thus, PA and Brown in particular functioned as a propaganda bureau for an unscrupulous Labour Government. That's what has happened and is happening again over S 59. We've reached the point in this new debate where Brown is again mixing faux magnanimity with (i) weird quasi-papal hectoring ("ill of you"), (ii) lying (conclusions of the American Psychological Association that aren't), and (iii) flippant deceptiveness (Barnett is said to think the "sky is falling", but surely Bradford et al. were the ones saying that that was true insofar as their Bill didn't pass, that it must in fact have already fallen in places such as NSW, etc.). The details of the crime-scene differ, but the same fingerprints, political techniques, and rhetorical strategies are everywhere. Undogmatic PA readers, if any exist, should be aware of this.

S 59 Debate: 'Pressions

I don't feel qualified to assess the political strategy involved, but the intellectual terms of National's capitulation on Sue Bradford's bill are depressing.
John Key apparently accepts that smacking your child is currently assault, and hence that S 59 is simply about adjudicating criminal responsibility for an offence. That's false. He also appears to accept Chester Borrows's buttressing view (which is quite at odds with S 59 let alone the vast majority of NZ-ers) that smacking is at best a mistake and a human frailty for which parents should not be harshly treated.
One has to hand it to Bradford, Clark, Public Address, No Right Turn, Just Left,.... Get a very substantive anti-smacking, or anti-(x≥smacking) bill passed while

1. Denying that that's what you're doing (and decrying anyone who says that that's what you're doing as hysterical, and that instead you're really only anti-(x>>smacking)), and
2. Fending off all compromises that would have narrowly tailored a smacking exception (an anti-(x>smacking) bill) as incompatible with your anti-(x≥smacking)/all-physical-punishment-is abusive/bad-parenting/human-rights-violating etc. views
   

Getting away with either 1 or 2 would be an achievement, but getting away with both at the same time is little short of amazing. I'm impressed in roughly the same way that I was impressed by the Bush admin. doing what it wanted on Iraq:

"We'll invade this country, see.... Anyone can do such a thing with lots of international support and lots of good evidence. Then it's easy! We'll do it with no support and no good evidence at all, just because we can. We create our own realities...."

Key and co. are playing what we might call the "Hillary Clinton" role. Whether that's a shrewd accommodation of difficult parliamentary realities, or evidence of soft-headedness in the face of opponents' slipperiness and unscrupulousness, or both remains to be seen.
More on the Iraq comparison: there was a case for invading Iraq, just not the hideous one that the Bush people made. Similarly, there was a reasonable case to be made for repealing S 59, just not the insulting dog's breakfast of lies, smokescreens, ad hominem attacks, genetic fallacies, question-begging, and guilt-by-association reasoning that Bradford et al. have served up. In both cases, any conceivable enthusiasm for the underlying message was utterly destroyed by the duplicity and general vileness of the messengers.

S 59 Debate: Aucklander at Large

A blogger Aucklander at Large (AAL) says a bunch of stuff that is depressingly typical. I'll comment on a couple of AAL's paragraphs which I render in green type and in order:

I have to hand it to the right on this one - they really have won the battle on public misinformation over repealing Section 59. According to people like my good friend Bob McCoskrie, this is about turning lightly smacking your children a criminal offence - mums and dads across the country will end up in prison - but luckily the police won't prosecute if you do smack your children, so the whole thing is pointless. And the public have lapped this up. (my italics)

This opening paragraph is curious in various ways.
We're told that there's misinformation afoot.... and a "good friend" is cited as purveying this misinformation. But what is the misinformation? Sue Bradford's bill does criminalize light smacking+, so that can't be it. The answer seems to be the claim of "aboutness": the good friend is right about what the Bill does but misinforms to the extent he suggests that the Bill is "about" what it does. This is a fairly bizarre move to make. Who cares what a Bill is "about"? It's what it does/says that matters (surely that's what the "good friend" would insist). Compare a prohibition of alcohol or a zero-tolerance level of alcohol for drivers: one can go on till the cows come home about "preventing hideous smashes" or "saving lives" or whatever else taking such steps might be "about", but ultimately all of that just distracts from assessing the merits of the prohibition/additional criminalization itself. A bad Bill can't be saved because it's "about" something good nor should a good Bill be damned because it's allegedly "about" something bad.

Maybe the police won't prosecute because that's not what Sue Bradford's bill is all about. It is simply about giving children the same rights as every other citizen of New Zealand, in that parental discipline will no longer be a valid defence for beating the crap out of your children.

Bradford's Bill criminalizes smacking one's children for correction but that's supposed to be OK because it's "about giving children the same rights" etc.. As we went into in detail here this
is a silly way to put things: children have exactly the same or greater protections against arbitrary adults that adults do, it's just that their parents stand in a very special relation to them, which makes all the difference. Bradford's Bill de-acknowledges one traditionally very important dimension of/possibility within that special relationship... one can tryy to see that as a rights issue if one wants but that's a big step: you're then saying that even if smacking had demonstrable benefits for children parents couldn't provide them because it would violate child's rights to do so. At any rate, like so many other writers on the issue, AAL shows no understanding of these different dimensions of what he's suggesting.
The remark about S 59 being a valid defence for "beating the crap out of kids" is a cheap shot, after all everyone agrees that "beating the crap out of" is not covered by S 59 defences (that would be "unreasonable force", right?). Of course the occasional S 59 case will succeed in that way - mistakes/false positives are made with every defence both statutory and common law. And there will always be close calls where reasonable people and different juries can and will disagree about where the line is, and what should be allowed, what's reasonable. That's life. And to the extent that one really wanted to reduce the false positive rate and eliminate cases of misclasssified "beating-the-crap-out-of" cases, well then the various Borrows-type amendments were available.... which Bradford and AAL opposed. Truly then we're in emotive red-herring-land here.... So depressing.

But, no, of course it's a big leftwing conspiracy against all parents who "undertake good parenting" and occasionally smack their children, and will turn mum and dad New Zealanders into criminals.

And this takes the biscuit! After high-velocity mongering of a variety of distortions AAL accuses others of making stuff up... citing stuff that's factually correct as some of the stuff that's made up! Good grief.

S 59 Debate: The Principled Argument

One of the most common arguments against S 59 is the argument that somehow it's illegitimate to allow parents to use force with respect to their children that one doesn't allow them to use against adults. Here's Deborah Coddington's version of the point:

My argument is simply this: when cases of assault come before a judge, children should be entitled to the same protection as adults. If an adult hits another adult, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action. Allowing adults to use this defence when they hit children reduces the status of children - they're lesser beings.

Here's Russell Brown's version put as a question:

Is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a child that we would not sanction against an adult?

And here's one of No Right Turn's many, completely feral versions:

We should not be enshrining violence against children in law, any more than we should be allowing husbands to use "minor and inconsequential" violence against their wives, or Pakeha to use "minor and inconsequential" violence against Maori.

This is an important, but, we'll show, utterly mistaken argument.

We begin, however, by noting that this argument is a point of alleged principle and is completely different from any arguments about the balance of social costs and benefits, or about, say, weighing possible additional security from and discouragement of crazy parents against the certain invasiveness inflicted on and insults delivered to normal parents. If this argument works then it does so regardless of whether any child is ever injured or suffers under the current regime. And if strong empirical evidence were developed tomorrow that smacking had substantial benefits for kids then the principled argument would be there to tell us that that would just be their and our tough luck. We would no more be permitted to benefit our children by smacking them in that case than we are currently allowed to benefit arbitrary adults by slapping them (i.e., assuming that that would in fact benefit them, e.g., perhaps generally by waking them up or getting them to appreciate their lives, etc.. Or perhaps more specifically, e.g., someone walks down the street picking their nose. The underlying slovenliness this behavior betrays threatens to hurt the person in all manner of social and career ways, possibly even ruining his life. It might be true that a slap would be a uniquely vigorous and effective, behavior-changing expression of the social stigma and disapproval that will otherwise operate very diffusely and damagingly.)

Now let's start discussing the argument itself. We initially follow Coddington's formulation: If an adult hits another adult, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action? Why? Well, contra Coddington, in the parent-child case it wasn't the "reasonableness" of the force itself that constituted the justification, it was that the force was used by a parent, and by the fact that parenting is a very specific role that includes responsibility for the child's welfare and also the power to correct/discipline the child.
The parent-child relation is a very special relation of authority, one that has no serious counterpart in the adult-adult world. Indeed the core of Enlightment politics holds that it's constitutive of adulthood that only the law – to which each adult both gives consent and of which she is a co-author through her (in principle) political participation – has authority over you, not any individual. There's no comparable "reasonable force" clause with respect to other adults because adults aren't (and can't be) authorities over other adults. You aren't responsible for other adults, and it's not your place/role to correct/discipline them.... If, per impossibile, it were your place, then they'd be like children compared to you, a point that a modern liberal democracy can never accept. In particular, husbands aren't authorities over their wives – women aren't child-like either in general or in comparison to any married partner they may have in particular. This latter point took a while to get through the law's and society's thick head. And traces of the discredited "women are just rather-large-children" view still linger on in the law albeit probably harmlessly. So in the Crimes Act 1961 there's:

• 196 Common assault. Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year who assaults any other person.

but there's also, what we might call a "women and other children" (!) clause:

• 194 Assault on a child, or by a male on a female. Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years who— (a)Assaults any child under the age of 14 years; or (b)Being a male, assaults any female.

Consider again Russell Brown's version of the point:

• Is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a child that we would not sanction against an adult?

[Note that Brown distorts matters by focusing on "an act" in abstraction from the act's specific type of author just as Coddington distorts matters by focusing on "reasonable force" in abstraction from the role of the person who employs the force. Both are versions of one of Sue Bradford's filthier lies.]
The correct reply is two-fold. First, there'd better a good justification since evidently parents do get to get to decide what their children eat, what they wear, what they read or watch, with whom they associate, where they are physically located on a more or less minute-to-minute basis, and so on. A concrete example: parents get to carry their children screaming out of restaurants against their will. No counterparts of these actions are permitted against other adults: all would constitute assault, kidnapping, stalking, and so on.
Second, we know what the form of that justification is: it's the specific authority of the parent over the child that is the transforming feature across all these cases. No offences are occurring, it's just parenting: nothing to see here, move along.

It's useful to compare S 59 with the justification defence with which it is grouped in the Crimes Act 1961 under the heading "Powers of Discipline":

• 60 Discipline on ship or aircraft. The master or officer in command of a ship on a voyage or the pilot in command of an aircraft on a flight is justified in using and ordering the use of force for the purpose of maintaining good order and discipline on board his ship or aircraft if he believes on reasonable grounds that the use of force is necessary, and if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances.

Why isn't Russell Brown inclined to ask:

• Is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a passenger that we would not sanction against a non-passenger?

Why isn't Coddington inclined to say:

My argument is simply this: when cases of assault come before a judge, passengers should be entitled to the same protection as non-passengers. If a Captain hits a non-passenger, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action. Allowing Captains to use this defence when they hit passengers reduces the status of passengers - they're lesser beings.

Brown and Coddington don't say such things because in the passenger case the structure of (implicitly consented to) authority is clear, and it's obvious

• why such authority is important
• how it's grounded in a specific role
• why any "rights-being-infringed" outrage let alone "lesser being" outrage is simply obtuse.

No offences are occurring when the Captain of a ship (say) exercises her authority, it's just being a Captain (being the law in a micro-environment where normal legitimate authority can't reach): nothing to see here, move along. Abuse can happen or be suspected of course, which police could decide to investigate, and an impartial body such as a jury might then be called upon to adjudicate. But that's not the normal case.

So far we've just argued in very general terms that the structure of authority that permeates parent-child relationships changes everything and that it makes most actions of parents vis-a-vis their children strictly incomparable to any normal adult-adult actions or indeed to actions of adults with respect to other people's children. Children of course currently have either the same or greater legal protections against the actions of arbitrary adults that adults do. Only the children's parents as the authorities over them are a special case where something very different is going on: special responsibilities are undertaken in that case, and corresponding special powers acknowledged.
My own view is that that's enough – that we've met the challenge of a completely abstract (disconnected-from-social-costs etc.) point of alleged principle that would require us to think about parent-child relations in exactly the same terms as adult-adult relations and accuse us of treating children as "second-class citizens" to the extent that we don't. That line of thought has simply nothing to recommend it.
Having established that there's no possibility of thinking through a parent-child relationship in terms drawn from the adult-adult world where notions of:

• autonomy
• absolute individual sovereignty
• rights = a structure of minimum standards of treatment

are paramount, the most natural thing to do is characterize the basic social desire/value as the holistic one: "We want parents to be good parents to their kids" and, perhaps, "Children deserve to be well-raised" and to reserve serious condemnation and certainly criminality only for fairly catastrophic overall failures.
Note that we could, if we wanted to, announce that children have

• a right to be raised by both a mum and a dad

or perhaps it should be

• a right to be raised by their actual biological mother and father
  

And any such announcement could be buttressed with a wealth of data contrasting the fortunes of children in sole-parent vs. children in two-parent situations. Let's then explore various forms of zero-tolerance policies against sole-parents: enough of treating children of sole-parents as second-class children.....
Well, let's not! Similarly then

• a right not to be smacked (even if it would be good for them to be smacked - "You aren't allowed to smack adults or your wife just because it would in fact do them some good....")
  

or perhaps it should be

• a right not to be corrected period (i.e., even non-physically)

looks like it clutters up the landscape of parenting to no obviously good end. Even granted (as we shouldn't grant - see here and here) the availability of appropriately negative data, nobody believes that either single-parenting or smacking portends anything like catastrophic parenting failure. Rather at worst there's evidence of a kind of run-of-the-mill, local sub-optimality. The significance of that is indeterminate without knowing much more about how the overall project of being good parents and of raising their children well, is going for the parents in question. The piecemeal alleged "rights" adduced here are spurious markers of local, non-negotiable interest that make no sense independently of wider interests. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that "rights"-discourse is inherently the wrong moral key in which to give voice to parent-child norms and goals.

In our view what remains are questions about what it is to be a good parent and what responsible exercise of one's parental authority consists in. In our view too, there's every reason to believe that parenting involves ineliminable tradeoffs and hence that a wide range of answers to these questions are possible. (See here for further useful discussion of this point.)

But not everyone is going to agree with our assessments either of the fate of the principled argument or of answers to "what is good parenting?"-type questions. Rather, at least some people will continue to pursue a mixed strategy of (i) trying to reformulate the principled objection more tightly and (ii) also insisting that there are highly determinate answers to parenting matters that it makes sense to code into the criminal law.

For this reason, even though in our view it's not required, it does make sense to continue the dialectic a few steps further, hence to try to defend in some more specific terms why parental authority over a child allows for smacking, the use of force to correct/discipline etc.. Here goes.

Our basic answer to the question of the grounds for parents being allowed to act against their children in ways they can't against adults (or other people's children) is that parents are authorities over their children and not over anyone else. One way to try to resist this as a complete solution to the problem that smacking poses is to raise cases in which adults are under the authority of other adults but in which we don't permit corporal punishment. Pressing in this direction leads to the following reformulation:

• Is there a good reason to allow an act against a child (over whom one has authority), that we would not allow against an adult (over whom one has authority)?

Or, even more simply:

• We smack kids but we don't smack, say, prisoners. Why?

There are at least three, closely connected reasons.

• Necessary vs. Contingent Authority. Children aren't autonomous individuals. Someone else necessarily has responsibility for and power over them. Prisoners, however, remain adults and authorities in their own right (hence they can be and have been held fully responsible for their actions, etc.). They're still autonomous, they've just forfeited the benefits of that autonomy. They're only contingently someone else's responsibility or in anyone else's power. We can put the point by saying that parents are necessary authorities over their children whereas prison guards are only contingently authorities over prisoners, where, of course, the contingency in question is the prisoner's own actions, i.e., exercises of their autonomy. For reasons that remain a little obscure, western countries have decided that terms of incarceration should not violate the prisoners autonomy (bodily or otherwise) beyond what's required to enforce the basic forfeit/exclusion from free society. How far this is a principled decision as opposed to a broadly technological achievement is unclear. It seems likely, for example, that if fifty people crash land on a desert island that fining and imprisoning people might be impossible, but that correction and discipline would still have to occur. Flogging people might then make a comeback. For another example, fairly traditional isolated human communities are about 150 people (the community size for which the human neo-cortex appears to be scaled/optimized), do not have the resources to imprison, etc.. Persistent trouble-makers are punished with exile or worse, e.g., the traditional Eskimo solution: miscreants are pushed off the ice. (Compare: most of us think that it's important, as a matter of principle, to always treat people as individuals etc.. Hence anti-discrimination provisions of various sorts. But that alleged principle, and especially its legal expressions only make sense because we live in a world where other people can in fact reliably draw conclusions about ones individual ability/character. Your CV is as good as the next person's, your money or credit is as good as the next person's, and so on. If none of the broadly technological infrastructure of credentialing authorities, easily checkable references, a common currency, credit reports, etc. existed, then that wouldn't be so. If most of the ways we have to establish individual ability and merit were gone, then all of the statistical information about various groups in society together with facts about your membership in those groups would become very relevant to someone's decision to hire you, offer you a place in a course, sell you something, etc.. In such a situation current prohibitions on public reasoning about people stereotypically, on the basis of their membership in various groups, would not and probably should not long survive.)
  The point that the contingency of the authority over prisoners is an expression of the prisoners' own autonomy – hence completely different from the child case – runs deep. Consider that there are distinct ways in which it makes perfectly good sense to think of the prisoners as the authors of their own fates. First, by their own actions the prisoners have excluded themselves from the benefits of a liberal democracy – a political system which is dedicated to the proposition that human beings get to be the authors of their own lives. The prisoners fate conforms to that: the prisoners are themselves the authors of their own exclusion. Second, the very possibility of a liberal democracy and all its benefits depends upon enforcing the exclusion of those people who by their actions exclude themselves. Every second of every day as a free person depends upon those who violate that freedom being locked away. Before the incarcerated were prisoners, they were free and they implicitly or explicitly endorsed all the necessary conditions of that freedom including the locking up of people who are as they themselves have turned out to be. There's a sense, then, in which prisons themselves are one of the great benefits and enabling features of liberal democracy, and we honor the prisoners' autonomy by restricting their freedoms now in the name of principles they themselves endorsed.

• Personal vs. Impersonal Authority. Parents love their children (that's the default assumption that guides letting people raise their own children rather than, say, requiring everybody to re-apply for the job of raising their child shortly after birth). It's therefore a personal authority not an impersonal one. Parents are in it for the long haul. They in fact have every incentive not to brutalize their children. They want their children to love them back, eventually look after them as they age etc.. In the impersonal case there's none of that structure and constraint and scale, hence in principle one might want to regulate much more closely what impersonal authorities may do, etc.. Moreover, the core of Enlightenment politics holds that it's constitutive of adulthood that only the law – to which each adult both gives consent and which each adult through her in principle political participation co-writes/-makes/-authors – has authority over you, not any individual. (Note too that the personal-ness which gives us confidence that there's a kind of natural scale and sensitivity to the physical discipline that's administered by parents doesn't obviously transfer to teachers, babysitters, etc.. They can never know as much as the parents about what's going on with the child, nor are they themselves disciplined by the continuity of interest projecting out over the next 20-30 years. Historically the in loco parentis = "in the place of the parents" concept has been fairly loosely applied to cover these cases and many others. That's risky and, depending upon a society's attitude towards risk, possibly a mistake. Note too that proliferation of various sorts of blended families, step-families, and de facto situations of various sorts have argubly blurred what counts as a "parent" and, even more so, who can be or is at any given moment in loco parentis. One nightmare possibility is that breakdown of de jure family structure makes perfectly well-defined legal ideas such as S 59 unworkable in the world that's been fairly recently created. I'll post on this point on another occasion.)

• Training/installing/growing autonomy. Children aren't yet the acculturated and rational agents they'll become. Hence parents are constantly manipulating their children, rather than addressing their reason or proto-reason. They do some of the latter too, of course, and increasingly so as the children grow, but it's never the whole story and possibly not even the majority of the story. A parent is not endeavoring to respect her child's autonomy (it doesn't exist yet), she's trying to raise it to be autonomous: installing autonomy, growing it. In principle, a range of different tools might be needed within that training and installation period that might have no counterparts later on, and in fact that does seem to be the case. Note that there at least two separate, important aspects to the training/installation period idea. First, there's the idea of children as being emotionally and rationally embryonic, hence as being less amenable to rational instruction and more manipulatable by both minor pleasure and pain. Second there's the idea that this is a transitional period, one whose end any manipulative techniques including any physical punishment actually hasten. If you knew that your child was never going to grow up and become autonomous then much of the impetus for manipulative techniques of any sort, especially corrective techniques that involve inflicting physical or psychological pain (e.g., they don't get the ice cream everyone else gets), seems to dissolve. What's the point in that case (which is similar to the case of elderly relatives who may have regressed back into a child-like state)?
  

What's left for our opponent? Final move: she can perhaps try to insist that although we've undoubtedly developed a number of differences between guards and prisoners on the one hand and parents and children on the other hand, we've still left something unexplained. Why do any of these differences make a difference? Why some smacking rather than no smacking? (cf. Why something rather than nothing?) Why is it OK to smack a creature that you're very personally training up? Why should even authority that's both necessary and personal have any special latitude with respect to physical force?

At this point I say that all pretense of there being an actual principled argument that anyone should feel compelled to answer has broken down. We were supposed to be confronting an argument built around a substantive comparison of some sort, one that would convince us independently of all matters of social cost and benefits that the status quo had some problem of broadly moral consistency. That argument was supposed to be of the sort that, in principle, could govern us against children's interests ("Yes recent research suggests smacking would strongly benefit children, too bad that we aren't allowed to be inhumane to and degrade people for their benefit. Our hands are tied!"). That has now reduced to asking the status quo to justify itself in some more intrinsic, noncomparative way (and beyond just citing the basic sense that having special responsibilities and special powers go together makes). The status quo is under no obligation to answer that sort of bare challenging question. If the status quo does answer, however, it may point to benefits and tradeoffs of various sorts, but the status quo doesn't have to imagine that everyone will agree that those are significant benefits or that everyone will find those particular tradeoffs are best ("Vive la difference. Maybe neither smacking nor correction more generally is for you"). You can never convince some people that being a single parent or ending a marriage might make sense either. "I'd never raise a kid by myself, kids have a right to both a mum and a dad", "I'd never....", "I'd always find some way to..." Perhaps that's right. Maybe you wouldn't, wouldn't, and would respectively. Good for you.

Many people find some value in having smacking in their parental tool-kit. And a few parents are true disciplinarians and run their families like boot-camp (You suggest to your kids that they might want to think about picking up after themselves a bit more, they tell their kids to "drop and give me 20".). In broadest terms, all of those people are and should be open to new ideas. If smacking kids can be shown to be like not rotating your crops, they'd like to be told. But they know shabby research when they see it, and they insist on waiting for social scientists to get their house in order before drawing any conclusions. And they can spot flat illiberal assertion and intolerance of diversity dressed up as principled argument a mile off.

S 59 Debate: Coddington Codswallap about Smacking

Deborah Coddington often makes little sense, but her senselessness about smacking so perfectly expresses the congealed mass of chattering class platitudes and general idiocy on the issue (and the clot hasn't moved much in the month or so since Coddington's piece appeared) that it's worth reviewing in detail.
While it's slightly boring to do so, I'll commentate more or less line-by-line/sentence-by-sentence on her NZ Herald article.

I'll use green type for Coddington's text, which I include in full and in order. I'll refer to Coddington as "Codd" throughout. Warning: my commentary is at least 6 times as long as Codd's original article. It's much easier to make a huge mess than it is to clean one up!

The Smacking Debate Story: Bradford's law will save our children
By Deborah Coddington, The New Zealand Herald, March 18, 2007
Despite the vitriolic opposition from those claiming the "right" to discipline their children with violence, Sue Bradford's amendment to Section 59 of the Crimes Act looks set to pass. (my bolding)

Two remarks. First, and most obviously: it's deceptive and question-begging for Codd to use the term "violence" in place of S 59's "force that's reasonable in the circumstances". Consider another justification defence:

• 41 Prevention of suicide or certain offences. Every one is justified in using such force as may be reasonably necessary in order to prevent the commission of suicide...

Here force that's both reasonable and necessary in the circumstances is licensed. Does one really want to claim S 41 allows violence to be used against those threatening suicide? One can if one wants maintain that all force is violence but normally "violence" implies unreasonableness, malevolence, lack-of-control, self-servingness, and so on, none of which apply to the actions anticipated in S 41. Or in S59. So using "violence" is deceptive and conclusory. Just as actions in accord with S41 or S 59 aren't assaults (for full discussion see here) it would be natural to say that they aren't episodes of violence either. I assume that Codd realizes her description is unfair in this way, and that she uses it anyway.
Second, while some people are inclined to frame smacking issues in terms of parents' rights (and also as a kind of contest between parents' rights and children's rights) and say that parents have a right to smack their children, it's not essential to talk that way. I don't. And there are good reasons not to.
All that's legally required is that parents are permitted to smack (that's all a justification defence itself buys you, hence all that supporting the availability of such a defence requires). Whether parents are permitted to do so as a matter of right is a separate, very ticklish question. As we've emphasized in previous posts, especially here, S 59 is a justification defence. Consider some other justification defences:

• 41 Prevention of suicide or certain offences. Every one is justified in using such force as may be reasonably necessary in order to prevent the commission of suicide, or the commission of an offence which would be likely to cause immediate and serious injury to the person or property of any one, or in order to prevent any act being done which he believes, on reasonable grounds, would, if committed, amount to suicide or to any such offence.
• 48 Self-defence and defence of another. Every one is justified in using, in the defence of himself or another, such force as, in the circumstances as he believes them to be, it is reasonable to use.
• 55 Defence of dwellinghouse. Every one in peaceable possession of a dwellinghouse, and every one lawfully assisting him or acting by his authority, is justified in using such force as is necessary to prevent the forcible breaking and entering of the dwellinghouse by any person if he believes, on reasonable and probable grounds, that there is no lawful justification for the breaking and entering.
• 60 Discipline on ship or aircraft. The master or officer in command of a ship on a voyage or the pilot in command of an aircraft on a flight is justified in using and ordering the use of force for the purpose of maintaining good order and discipline on board his ship or aircraft if he believes on reasonable grounds that the use of force is necessary, and if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances.

It's relatively plausible that one is permitted to defend oneself and ones home as a matter of right (whatever exactly rights are supposed to be). But it's not especially plausible that one has a right to try to prevent others from committing suicide, or that a Captain has a right to use force to control passengers, or even that one has a right to defend others. In these three cases it's clear that there's something that we want to permit or even encourage people to do. There's a purpose or context or goal or interest or activity that society approves of and wants to facilitate. But "right" doesn't obviously enter into it.
Now consider S 59. On the one hand "rights"-talk has more of a grip in the parental case than it does in these other cases both because (as in the defence of self and home cases) parent-child relations have an identity that's independent of any state, and because there are straightforward senses (starting but not ending with the biological, inclusive fitness sense) in which ones children are extensions of oneself. On the other hand there's a clear sense in which parenthood does feel like an optional job/role hence that, like the Captaincy case, there's a kind of conditionality build into it that ill-suits the absolute/unconditional character that we ordinarily think of rights as having (again, whatever rights are).
For these sorts of reasons as well as because (i) I generally find "rights"-talk a little mysterious, and (ii) I generally prefer not to take on any excess ideological baggage, I prefer to largely eschew talk of parental rights in the smacking debate. To be in favor of some version of S 59 is to be in favor of a permission but not necessarily to think that any question of rights is activated. By focusing on people who incautiously put matters in "rights" terms, Codd focuses on people who engage in slight overkill thereby giving her a bigger target. And this is to say that she already illicitly makes things easier on herself.

Future New Zealand will thank Bradford, along with the Maori Party, whose MPs had the sense to realise the negative message their not supporting the bill would deliver to constituents - Maori are over-represented in domestic violence statistics.
Since 1999, when I wrote a feature on the death of 4-year-old James Whakaruru, I have advocated repealing Section 59. Research involved interviewing James' whanau, where smacks were every-day - nay, every-hour - "discipline" for their kids. Mum's busy; smack over the head. Dad's hungover; smack around the ear. Stop grizzling; smack around the bum. Smack, smack, smack. That's often the only touching many New Zealand children receive from those they look to for love and affection.

Go here for the NZ Children's Commission summary of the Whakaruru case. Here is the NZ Herald's summary:

"All sides of James' family were well-known to social workers. The Whakaruru family had had six interactions on care and protection and youth justice issues since 1965. The [father and killer's] Haerewa family had had eight such notifications, and James' natural father's family had had 13. Young James was on a road to hell on Earth before he was even born. Just days before his birth, [his mother] Te Rangi slit her wrists. She was just 15 and she survived, but over the next five years her small and lovely son with the warm brown eyes was beaten, stomped, hit and bludgeoned by her boyfriend until he finally died, a miserable, lonely and agonisingly painful death."

S 59 played no legal role in that case for the obvious reason that it couldn't: "reasonable force" was never at issue, and, as Codd notate with her quotation-marks, nothing resembling "discipline" or even "parenting" went on in that child's dreadful family. As we discussed here, crazy, renegade cases aren't normally probative with respect to the vast middle of society. One person's well-within-limits beer-after-work and drive home is another person's licence to drink wildly, drive off completely plastered and kill lots of people. A casino is a fun night out for you and for most people like you, but it's a few people's ruin. You and your relatively well-adjusted friends can watch sadistic horror films without appreciable ill-effect, whereas a very small number of people will be led to inflict copycat sadistic violence on others. And so on. But we don't have alcohol prohibition, we don't ban gambling, and we don't have have massive amounts of censorship.

The only way to change these people's attitudes is to change the law (my bolding)

It's not clear who "these people" refers to. The Whakaruru family? Those who don't seriously abuse but who smack indiscriminately and who otherwise never touch their kids? Anybody who smacks? Let's suppose the middle option. Then Codd claims that (a) parents who smack a lot and are otherwise unloving can't be turned into better parents in any other way than by changing the law, and (largely implicitly but see her piece's title) that (b) changing the law will change them into better parents (or else why bother?).
But now we have three points of attack. First, it's odd and extremist to tailor a whole society's legal regime to try to improve the behavior of relatively small numbers of degenerate parents. The class of parents we're talking about here, after all, while surely larger than the very small class of horrifically abusive (and surely beyond any straightforward legal solution) parents such as those in the Whakaruru case, can't itself be more than a few percent of families.
Second, the "only" or "no other way" (a)-point is unconvincing. Why aren't broader education efforts about good parenting, more involved social services, and so on exactly the right thing to work on? Third, the (b)-point that a law change will itself create good parents who would otherwise be bad is dubious. Why won't the degenerate (unaffectionate, resentful etc.) parents just become degenerates who don't smack and are simply uninvolved? And, of course, Codd just assumes, without any argument at all, that there's no downside to eliminating smacking parenting-wise.

and anyone who doesn't agree should be consistent and oppose laws against speeding, seatbelt wearing, smoking.

This is pathetic. If someone doesn't accept both the very specific (a) and (b)-points about a smacking prohibition and also the general principle that it's OK to trade away the interests and wishes of the capable majority to benefit or improve a small minority of screwups then that person should be opposed to every other piece of complex, interest-balancing, at least vaguely paternalistic legislation? Right..... And presumably if you are in favor of laws mandating wearing seatbelts then you must also be for every conceivable piece of invasive paternalistic legislation that any political hack might dream up, from alcohol prohibition, to allowing the Government to choose your child's name, to prohibiting single-parent families, to re-introducing anti-fornication and anti-cohabitation laws, to fining people who don't go to church. Once you've tasted sin with those seat-belts....
We're more used to hearing this sort of ridiculous pseudo-argument– "Here's my proposal. Anyone who's against it must logically be advocating anarchy" from what we might call reactionary creeps. Here's center-right-ish Andrew Sullivan resisting reactionary creepiness from hard-core right-winger David Frum:

'Your argument now is that there is no discernible difference between advocating for a same-sex relationship and advocating for incest as legally married states. Or--perhaps because you understandably fear this may come across as a little harsh--you argue that the distinctions between same-sex marriage and incest are so inherently difficult to draw and open to further question.... that the only real choice is between the current definition of marriage and complete moral and social anarchy. Charles Krauthammer has also made this argument. So has William Bennett, who called any defense of same-sex marriage inherently "morally relativist," because once one has conceded ground on homosexuality, there is no possible rational defense against polygamy, bestiality, incest, and heaven knows what else. This, as a type of argument, is not so much the analogy of the slippery slope as the slippery cliff. It is to say that either one accepts the current state of affairs as a whole or one is a social anarchist, who believes in no limits whatsoever to human behavior. I suppose I should be grateful that the analogy you bring up is incest; and that Krauthammer's and Bennett's is polygamy. Why not say that advocating for same-sex marriage is indistinguishable from arguing for child abuse, murder, or slavery as legitimate forms of marriage? Well, you are civilized men and this is a civilized debate.
But, David, as you well know, this line of debate is not an argument; and it has nothing to do with conservatism. It is pure reactionaryism. The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions. The difference between cranks and conservatives is that the latter can actually use their reason to divine when change is therefore warranted and when it is not. If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage--or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs. It is intellectually laughable.

And it's just as laughable when it comes from left-wing and stridently anti-reactionary forces of the sort that tend to have the upper hand in New Zealand. Complete bullshit (convenient) absolutism and extremism knows no political orientation. Creeps are everywhere.

Beatings, such as the one which killed James, started with smacks.

And every alcoholic started with just a single glass of beer. And every person who ever drove 80 mph over the speed limit started off by just going a few mph over the limit. And every serial killer's first book is the Bible. What's your point Codd? 100% pure slippery slope madness? Apparently.

But when I went to Parliament I didn't have the guts to defy my political party. To my shame, I shut up and toed the party line.

Well, if you had had any good arguments then maybe you would have been able to win your party over. But, yes Codd, you have much to be ashamed of. You were a terrible Parliamentarian.

My argument is simply this: when cases of assault come before a judge, children should be entitled to the same protection as adults. If an adult hits another adult, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action. Allowing adults to use this defence when they hit children reduces the status of children - they're lesser beings.

This is an important – and, we'll argue, importantly mistaken – argument (which we discuss at greater length here). Begin, however, by noting that it's completely independent of everything Codd has mentioned so far.
If this argument works then it does so regardless of whether any child is ever injured or suffers under the current regime. And if strong empirical evidence were developed tomorrow that smacking had strong benefits for kids then that would just be their and our tough luck. We wouldn't in that case be permitted to benefit them any more than we'd be currently allowed to benefit arbitrary other adults by slapping them if evidence turned up that this would be beneficial for them. To repeat: this new argument is a point of alleged principle and is completely different from arguments about the balance of social costs and benefits, or about weighing possible additional security from and discouragement of crazy parents against the certain invasiveness inflicted on and the insult delivered to normal parents.

Now let's start discussing the argument itself. We initially follow Codd's formulation: If an adult hits another adult, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action? Why? Well, contra Codd, in the parent-child case it wasn't the "reasonableness" of the force itself that constituted the justification, it was that the force was used by a parent, and by the fact that parenting is a very specific role that includes responsibility for the child's welfare and also the power to correct/discipline the child.
The parent-child relation is a very special relation of authority, one that has no serious counterpart in the adult-adult world. There's no comparable "reasonable force" clause with respect to other adults because adults aren't (and can't be) authorities over other adults: you aren't responsible for other adults, and it's not your place/role to correct/discipline them.... if it were, then they'd be like children compared to you, which a modern liberal democracy can never accept. In particular, husbands aren't authorities over their wives – women aren't at all child-like in general, and not with respect to any married partner they may have in particular. Sometimes the point Codd is trying to make is put as the following question:

• Is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a child that we would not sanction against an adult?

The correct reply is two-fold. First, there'd better a justification since evidently parents do get to get to decide what their children eat, what they wear, what they read or watch, with whom they associate, where they are physically located on a more or less minute-to-minute basis, and so on. A concrete example: parents get to carry their children screaming out of restaurants against their will. No counterparts of these actions are permitted against adults (all would constitute assault, kidnapping, stalking, and so on).
Second, we know what the form of that justification is: it's the specific authority of the parent over the child that is the transforming feature across all these cases. No offences are occurring, it's just parenting: nothing to see here, move along.
It's useful to compare S 59 with the justification defence with which it is grouped under the heading "Powers of Discipline" in the Crimes Act 1961:

• 60 Discipline on ship or aircraft. The master or officer in command of a ship on a voyage or the pilot in command of an aircraft on a flight is justified in using and ordering the use of force for the purpose of maintaining good order and discipline on board his ship or aircraft if he believes on reasonable grounds that the use of force is necessary, and if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances.

Why not ask:

• Is there in fact a good justification that we should sanction - in whatever detail - an act against a passenger that we would not sanction against a non-passenger?

Why isn't Codd inclined to say:

My argument is simply this: when cases of assault come before a judge, passengers should be entitled to the same protection as non-passengers. If a Captain hits a non-passenger, he/she can't use "reasonable force" to justify the action. Allowing Captains to use this defence when they hit passengers reduces the status of passengers - they're lesser beings.

These things aren't asked or said because in the passenger case the structure of (implicitly consented to) authority is clear. And it's obvious

• why such authority is important
• how it's grounded in a specific role
• why any "rights-being-infringed" outrage let alone "lesser being" outrage is simply obtuse.

No offences are occurring when the Captain of a ship (say) exercises her authority, it's just being a Captain (being the law in a micro-environment where normal legitimate authority can't reach): nothing to see here, move along. Abuse can happen or be suspected of course, which police could decide to investigate, and an impartial body such as a jury might then be called upon to adjudicate. But that's not the normal case.
So far we've just argued in very general terms that the structure of authority that permeates parent-child relationships changes everything and that it makes most actions of parents vis-a-vis their children strictly incomparable to any normal adult-adult actions or indeed to actions of adults with respect to other people's children. Children of course currently have the same or greater legal protections against the actions of arbitrary adults that adults do. Only their parents as the authorities over them are a special case where something very different is going on: special responsibilities are undertaken, and special powers acknowledged. My own view is that that's enough – that we've met the challenge of a completely abstract (disconnected-from-social-costs etc.) point of alleged principle that would require us to think about parent-child relations in exactly the same terms as adult-adult relations and accuse us of treating children as "second-class citizens" to the extent that we don't. That line of thought has simply nothing to recommend it. For deeper discussion of the issues raised by the principled argument, see here.

Now the Act party argues that good caring parents will be criminals for administering a loving smack.

The "argues" here is irritating: corrective smacking is criminalized – put in the same indictable offense category as punching your wife currently is. That's the point if you're Codd or Sue Bradford. Whether anyone's actually prosecuted/indicted let alone convicted is of course another matter entirely....
Now Codd proceeds in two directions... first she argues/insinuates that "good caring parents" who smack their kids aren't possible, i.e., that anyone who smacks their child is ipso facto a bad parent.

In what way is a smack loving? Isn't that what abusive husbands tell their wives, and why abused wives stay? He did it because he loves me?

Codd, repeat after me: "Adults aren't (and can't be) authorities over other adults: you aren't responsible for other adults, and it's not your place/role to correct/discipline them....."
Second she focuses on the prosecution angle.

And why doesn't Act advocate the abolition of speed limits because good drivers are turned into criminals every time they do 53 or 105km/h? It's poppycock to say police will be forced to prosecute every parent who lightly smacks a child. Why wasn't Tana Umaga charged for whacking Chris Masoe with a handbag? Because our police force have got more sense than our politicians have.

I agree that some opponents of Bradford's initiatives have tended to overstate their practical problems. Sweden may not be uniquely desirable, or make as much sense as it could, but it's certainly not any sort of hell-hole! What seems to be going on is tit-for-tat for Bradford et al.'s exaggeration of the practical problems posed by relatively small numbers of arguable "false positives" under S 59 (i.e., of juries and judges apparently being able to be convinced occasionally that fairly extreme levels of physical force are reasonable in specific contexts of parental correction of their children). The problems with Bradford's Bill are problems of principle. It asserts comparability between incomparables, and illiberally uses the full force of the criminal law to impose a very disputable, not uniquely reasonable view on everyone else.

Bradford's bill won't stop child abuse, say some detractors. That's a feeble line mouthed by critics scared of being labelled PC, and refusing to acknowledge how anti-smoking legislation has reduced, not eliminated, smoking. I disagreed with anti-smoking laws but far fewer people now smoke and that's a good thing.

It does seem clear that there are distinguishable phenomena of abuse and of people with disastrously chaotic lives having kids that aren't addressed by Bradford's initiatives. The Whakaruru case Codd mentioned is a classic of this sort. Beyond that, sure, each amount of freedom in society (to drive, to drink, to gamble, to read what you want, to associate with whom you want, etc.) carries with it costs from crazies who'll exploit that freedom. Restricting or eliminating that freedom normally does buy some additional security from the crazies. But normally in a liberal democracy one thinks long and hard before trading away a central freedom that lots of people think is important just to help damp down the outliers, and one should in any case explore all sorts of less invasive solutions, e.g., public educational possibilities etc. before you settle on criminalization/prohibition as the lesser of the available evils. Previously Codd told us that as a Parliamentarian she didn't have the guts or nous to stand up to or break from her party's views about anti-smacking legislation. Now she tells us that her enthusiastic opposition to heavy-handed anti-smoking legislation was wrong? Does she believe in anything? Which other basic freedoms would she now be prepared to sacrifice? How much paternalism from the government is enough now for born-again Codd? And will it be enough for her tomorrow once the current round of paternalism has "succeeded" in the sense that it causes some easily quantifiable reduction in craziness while extirpating a broad range of harder to measure freedoms from the world and counting that loss as nothing?

Sadly, it will take many years before attitudes towards violence are changed. That was driven home to me when I saw what National MP Chester Borrows' amendment would allow: smacking kids for wetting the bed, hitting a sibling, breaking an ornament, running on to the road. I can't believe adults would smack children for this. My God, if parents still believe they can cure bedwetting with smacks, we have a problem.

Just as abuse etc. is distinguishable from legitimate correction of ones child, so policies about smacking are distinguishable from good-parenting itself. Roughly, whatever tools you give to parents those tools are only as good as the parents who get to use those tools. I don't know anything about bed-wetting myself, but if the point is that it's not properly something that is culpable/punishable any more than dyslexia is, and every parent is supposed to know that, then there's a parental mistake being made alright. Punishing the bed-wetter by denying the bed-wetter the ice cream everyone else gets would similarly then be ill-judged and possibly cruel. There's no problem for smacking as such here. [Note added April 30, 2007: Consider also this testimony from Watermelon. The author sees her experience through an anti-smacking lens and I don't think that we can conclusively say that she's wrong to do so, but the obvious interpretation is that there was generally rotten parenting going on. Watermelon describes for example, "walking on egg-shells", and receiving insistent, anger-laden, arbitrary/inconsistent, non-proportional punishment. It's plausible that things would have been about as disturbing and confusing and counter-productive as the author rightly laments even if all of the punishment had been non-physical.]

And when are we going to stop confusing education with discipline? If a child runs on to the road, it's because of ignorance - he or she hasn't grasped the concept that cars can kill. Aren't parents responsible for keeping a firm hold on little hands, or gates shut, so littlies are guarded from danger? And if we fail to do that, should we take it out on the children with a smack?

The details of the case matter (that's one reason why the criminal law shouldn't be wading in here)... but surely in general a lot of parenting mixes education and discipline. Here's activist Simon Barnett talking about about a version of exactly Codd's situation. His daughter Sophie had let go of his hand, and run across a busy road.

"I knelt down beside her and said, `I told you not to let go of daddy's hand.' A car had just missed her. My heart was racing. I wasn't angry at her; I really wasn't. I was like, `I can't believe you so disobeyed me.' So I smacked her hand. And it was hard. She cried for about 15 seconds. I said, `I'm sorry I had to do that, but you must never ever do that again.' And to this day she hasn't."

I'm thrilled for Codd that she's so sure she knows better than Barnett how to parent his child. I am struck dumb by the fact that she's so sure he's a terrible parent that she's prepared to make his parenting style make him at least an unindicted criminal. How marvellous that she's prepared to make him risk 2 years in prison for doing what most NZ-ers regard as an excellent job.
Barnett's example is lovely because he provides enough details to make Codd's remarks seem ridiculous, but also not too many so that the example breathes, and one is left thinking through the complexities to which a parent might in principle be sensitive. Perhaps Barnett 'errs on the side of caution' with his little girl. Maybe Barnett wouldn't have smacking his other daughters in that situation, but he knows Sophie rather well and had perhaps noted an additional streak of flightiness and recklessness in her that her sisters don't have. Perhaps that what was what led Barnett to see his decisive, slightly shocking action as required and as the right thing to do..... Who knows? At any rate, these are the sorts of calculations that many caring parents recognize.

[Note added April 30, 2007: Barnett appears to be the sort of case where there's good to ideal parenting going on. So if you are an anti-smacker of the highly personalized sort we referred to a few paragraphs back, it's probably tempting to roll your eyes and say,

"Well he'd be a good parent no matter what tools you gave him. In particular he's a good parent to Sophie, if he is, despite the occasional smack delivered not because of it."

It can start to seem, in this way, that those who are pro-choice about smacking focus mainly on good parents who'd be good even without being able to smack whereas the anti-smackers focus on bad parents who'd be bad even without being able to smack. Are, as it were, both "sides" equally guilty of distortion? To some extent yes. But anti-smackers are trying to ban something and to do that (without it turning into an arbitrary exercise of political power), they have to show, very roughly, that smacking's always bad. The pro-choice about smacking aren't under any similar obligation to show that all smacking's good. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and the pro-choicers about smacking were actual pro-smackers setting out to ban non-smackers, to cause them to lose custody of their children etc. ("those who would spoil the future by sparing the rod", etc.). In that case, again very roughly, the pro-smackers would have to show that non-smacking never works, not just that some non-smackers have kids who run wild (or whatever it might be).
Speaking more precisely, anti-smackers/banners have to show (at least!) that the very thing they want to ban - smacking itself, and not some of its common causes or some combinations of other factors causes grave harm etc.. That's hard to do. It's hard to rule out plausible alternative causal hypotheses (notably those that are suggested directly by one's own examples!). Perhaps, for example, even though smacking itself is fine, it's the sort of technique that attracts parents with, as we might say, "anger-management issues", and, over time, perhaps as an aspect of signaling, parents without any such issues largely shun the technique even though they could use it with profit. All manner of spuriously negative statistics about smacking can be generated under such conditions if one's model doesn't keep track of who's doing the smacking (let alone if one doesn't know how to describe all of the important dimensions along which parents differ). Those who are pro-choice about smacking are happy to see anti-smackers try to disavow Barnett's case as insignificant because he's a good parent (or whatever it is) because at least then the anti-smackers are thinking about alternative causal structures rather than tracing simple-minded correlations between smacking and bad outcomes of various sorts. The pro-choice are happy to see anti-smackers accept the obligation to develop more nuanced models and conduct more comprehensive studies before drawing any conclusions. Additional complexity and uncertainty work in favor of the status quo. That's appropriate. Established freedoms should get the benefit of the doubt. It shouldn't be easy to ban things. Sadly, of course, many anti-smackers don't accept their obligations, and prefer to stay on the surface of things, and to just deny or mock the whole idea of a good parent who smacks as a substitute for dealing with inconvenient complexity. That's Codd's line and it's also Watermelon's here.]

How fantastic that Codd thinks that it's just obvious that trains of thought about children such as Barnett's make no sense at all and that they must all be at bottom ghastly rationalizations like.....

Some years ago, marriage used to be a defence against rape. I wonder what today's politicians would say if we were changing that law today? Amendments defining the type of force husbands could use? Maybe when the wife deliberately refused him his conjugal rights? If she hit him? If she dented his car?

Codd, repeat after me: "Adults aren't (and can't be) authorities over other adults....." And a bit of basic humility about the limits of your own understanding and imagination wouldn't go astray either.

A stupid comparison you say?

We do.

Tell that to those who argue the Government shouldn't regulate what happens in the home. If persons in the home are being hurt then the state must step in to protect them.(my bolding)

This equivocates over "being hurt". If "being hurt" means "injure" etc. then current "unreasonable force" standards (let alone the sort of sharpening up of unreasonable force that, say, Borrows's amendment describes) cover it. If it's defined to include all the way down to a smack as in the Barnett case then, no, nobody's being hurt in any way that should prompt state intervention. I agree with Codd that (in any reasonably developed society) domestic matters including child-rearing can't ever be a purely private matter, or be beyond the reach of the law. Abusive and injuring parents are currently criminals and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of that law. There's no disagreement about that as far as I'm aware.

Yes, parenting is hard, but don't have kids if you don't view them as future adults entrusted to your care for a wee short time.

More question-begging obtuseness! Incorporating some amount of correction and physical discipline into ones parenting style appears to be a perfectly acceptable way of raising and taking care of future adults. It merely requires one to believe that their adulthood is still in the future.

Sharples is right - a hit is a hit. Smacks are wrong.

Recall our very first point: parents get to decide what their children eat, what they wear, what they read or watch, with whom they associate, where they are physically located on a more or less minute-to-minute basis, and so on. They get to carry their children screaming out of restaurants against their will. Now run the parallel cases:

• Kidnapping is kidnapping. Transporting an individual against her will is wrong.
  
• Controlling the minutiae of someone's diet is controlling the minutiae of someone's diet. And it's wrong.
• Controlling with whom one associates is......

Helen Clark and Peter Dunne are incredibly fortunate they can't remember being smacked. Like Pita Sharples, I remember being bashed. Unlike Sharples, I smacked my kids - not hard - but I shouldn't have. I don't feel guilty but it didn't work and I should have been stopped. (my bolding)

For you Codd, I think we could arrange a special retroactive couple of years in the Big House....

I wish we'd changed the law, and thus our attitude to domestic violence, decades ago. Hopefully in May when MPs finally vote, we'll make a start.(my bolding)

And so Codd brings us full circle, back to the deceptive, conclusory use of the term "violence" with which she began her article (plus the additional fillip of "domestic" to illicitly fuse adult-adult cases to parent-child cases).