Swedish Spanking Ban Spreads Nonviolent Culture Globally

Sweden is known for a lot of great things: it's massages, its Nobel prizes, its filmmakers, its fair dames, and let us not forget smörgåsbord with a variety of herring. Generally, however, spanking and bans on it do not come to mind. Yet this week Sweden is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of their ban on spanking children,  which proponents argue has done much to spur a nonviolent culture across the country-- and abroad.

Twenty-four other countries around the world passed similar spanking bans since 1979, when Sweden was the first to do so. At the time, traditional spankers claimed that the ban would lead to undisciplined children and could not be enforced. They turned out to be wrong: the percentage of children spanked has dropped from 90% to 10%, youth crime has decreased in Sweden since the mid-1990s, and violent crime has not gone up.

The Swedish ban on spanking is based on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, about which UNICEF says the following on its website:

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights—civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. In 1989, world leaders decided that children needed a special convention just for them because people under 18 years old often need special care and protection that adults do not. The leaders also wanted to make sure that the world recognized that children have human rights too.

Although the "legally binding" statement must be taken with a grain of salt because the U.N. itself has no legal way to enforce it, the Convention as a whole is heartening. 

Whether you want the right to spank your child or not, it is plausible that there is a direct correlation with Sweden's consistently strong appearances on the Global Peace Index and the spanking ban. To the old saying "spare the rod, spoil the child" can now be added another: "spare the child, and spoil the violence." Spanking in Sweden is less of a current event today than it was thirty years ago, but the more nonviolence future it has helped create is our present.