French woman receives six-month suspended sentence for smacking her child

Screenshot from Council of Europe video "Raise your hand against smacking"

"Yes I was smacked and it never did me any harm. In fact I deserved it," said one caller to Jean-Marc Morandini's 'phone-in programme on Europe 1 radio on Thursday.

"Smacking is not the same as child abuse, don't try to exaggerate," said another.

Both were responding to comments by Morandini's invited guest, paediatrician Edwige Antier, who was on the show to talk about spanking and the need for a law in France to ban it.

Antier was defending a ruling earlier this week in which a court in northern France gave a woman a six-month suspended sentence and ordered her to receive psychological counselling, after finding her guilty of wilful violence towards a minor for having slapped her nine-year-old daughter.

The incident that led to the woman being found guilty dates back to last December.

As reported in the French media, the woman, who had apparently been drinking, slapped her daughter during an argument at home.

The girl ran out of the house and into the street where she was intercepted by a passerby who happened to be a social worker.

Seeing the state the girl was in, the social worker took her to the nearest police station.

Her mother was then brought in for questioning and charged.

"The punishment is totally out of proportion," said the woman's lawyer, Alice Cohen-Sabban, after the suspended sentence was handed down.

"She has never needed social services to intervene for anything, she has never been convicted and although she had been drinking when the incident happened she is not an alcoholic," Cohen-Sabban told Agence France Presse.

But that's not quite how Antier sees it - or any other case of smacking come to that.

And when Morandini asked her whether she found the ruling "normal" the 68-year-old, who is also a member of parliament for the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) and tabled a bill in 2009 to make domestic corporal punishment unlawful in France, was quite clear about where she stands.

"Imagine you were faced with someone you knew who was much larger than you and had been drinking, and they turned round and hit you," she retorted.

"Would you find that normal?

"The law as it stands at the moment gives a mother the right to hit a child, and even a babysitter, if the motive is 'an educational one'," she continued.

"But the mother should be a 'protector' and what's needed in France is a law, as exists in 18 other European countries, abolishing the right parents have to hit a child."

Not many of the callers to the programme seemed to agree with her.

Nor did a lot of the comments left on French websites such as that of Le Point or Radio France Internationale in reaction to the suspended sentence handed down to the woman and the issue of smacking in general.

Ranging from " it doesn't do any harm," through "limits need to be set and children have to be disciplined" to "the sentencing in this case will just do more harm than good to the family and especially the girl involved," it certainly seems as though Antier's views put her in the minority.

And that's perhaps not surprising as a poll conducted among health professionals in France just last year showed that 88 per cent of them were against the introduction of a law banning smacking.

Domestic corporal punishment, of which smacking is one form, is against the law in many European countries, but not in France.

In 2008 the Council of Europe launched its "Raise your hand against smacking campaign" and called on all member states to pass laws prohibiting all forms of corporal punishment of children, including smacking.