In which she almost ticks the wrong box

[zeborah]

"Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

I know which box I want to tick in order to (hopefully) get the result I want. But oh my goodness that question has even more things wrong with it than I'd gathered from being vaguely aware of the news coverage about how wrong it is. It's like some terrible hybrid of presupposition-tricksiness (see also "Have you stopped beating your wife?) and layers-of-negation-tricksiness (see also Proposition 8).

To refine my earlier-today modification of a colleague's question on Twitter today: "Should confusing and biased referendum questions as part of a just democratic society be legal in New Zealand?"

Fortunately the stupid thing isn't binding on the Government. If it were I don't see how it'd be possible for the Government to figure out what the heck the results meant.

Comments

[zeborah]

Basically, the referendum is in response to a law change which removes the defense of "But I was only disciplining him, it's my right as a parent to do so!" for parents charged with child abuse.

It doesn't actually mean that if you smack your kid once you're going to jail, any more than slapping your girlfriend once means you're automatically going to jail.

For one thing, the police won't know; for another, the police really can't be bothered. But more importantly, the law still explicitly allows a bundle of times when you *are* allowed to smack your kid: eg smacking their hand away from a stove element or from an electrical outlet or from undoing their seatbelt or from pulling their sister's hair or from stealing a lolly from the store. The assumption, though, is that after the danger is over there are other ways to deal with the situation.

The opponents of the law, however, have carefully framed the debate (and the referendum question) to ignore all of this nuance and make it all about "Oh noes the Gover-mints are telling us how to raise our kids!" Hence the prejudicially worded referendum question.

(One might still validly decide that one wants to tick "no" - I obviously haven't but I can see the other side. But just because one would honestly answer that question "no" doesn't mean one wants to actually tick "no".)