UN Wants Parents Who Spank or Smack Children Jailed

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The United Nations wants parents who physically discipline their children with smacks or spankings to be thrown behind bars and have their families torn to shreds by government. Of course, the “Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Violence against Children,” Marta Santos Pais, did not put it quite that explicitly. But that is an accurate description of the UN bureaucrat’s demands, as issued in a series of official statements posted on the UN’s website this month. It is also part of the global agenda to destroy parental rights, as envisioned in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) that Santos Pais helped write and that extremists in the United States are trying to impose on the American people.

In recent years, the United States and the United Kingdom have both already come under UN fire for failing to criminalize parents who discipline their children. Last year, for example, the UN released a “human rights” report by “experts,” mostly from totalitarian regimes, blasting U.K. authorities for not bowing down to the anti-family agenda. Among other actions, the UN report called on the government to jail parents who spank or smack their children as a disciplinary tool. The UN “experts” also demanded a tax-funded propaganda campaign demonizing traditional parenting. In 2014, meanwhile, a similar UN “Human Rights Committee” demanded that the federal government ignore the U.S. Constitution to impose a nationwide ban on corporal punishment.

But the global war on parental rights led by the UN and its allies is only just getting started. In fact, according to the UN, “more than half of all children” are in danger — primarily from their parents. Last year, the UN claims “more than one billion children” were affected by “some form of violence.” If you have ever smacked or even lightly spanked your child, the UN is looking at you.

UN “Violence Against Children” czar Santos Pais, who has decades of experience as an international bureaucrat working at the UN and other transnational institutions, made that all fairly clear. Perhaps the most obvious giveaway of the UN bureaucrat’s agenda, though, was her celebration of what she called “fabulous initiatives” regulating parental discipline. The only specific law and campaign she cited as an example of the “fabulous initiatives,” a model for what she would like to see worldwide, was adopted by the Swedish government in 1979. The controversial law includes the world’s first total ban on all physical discipline and “other humiliating treatment.”

So what, exactly, does this law do? According to attorney Ruby Harrold-Claesson, the president of the Nordic Committee for Human Rights, the law has served primarily to destroy families and empower government.

“The law ranks all physical punishment of children [such as] a slap on the hand, on the cheek or on the bottom, as assault and battery,” she explained in a comprehensive report examining the situation. “Room-arrest is regarded as ‘other humiliating treatment.’” Among other concerns, Harrold-Claesson noted that the law has “resulted in serious interference in people’s family and private lives, and has damaged the relationship between parents and children,” to the detriment of the family as an institution. In the place of parents, government institutions have usurped responsibility over children, in many cases breaking up families, the prominent Swedish lawyer and human-rights activist explained.

“The law was said to be ‘primarily a valuable pedagogical support in the efforts to convince parents and others that no forms of violence are allowed to be tools in the raising of children,’” Harrold-Claesson continued. “Instead, the law has resulted in hundreds of normal parents being harassed by the police and the social authorities. Some parents have been prosecuted in the Courts, and sentenced and thus been criminalized, because they have smacked — or have allegedly smacked — their misbehaving children.” The internationally known Swedish jurist also said the role of families had been usurped, with government schools and social institutions being given a “monopoly over the children.”

Arrests and the destruction of families is common in nations with such laws in place.

Now imagine that sort of nightmarish regime, but on a global scale, and you can get a sense of what the UN and its “Violence Against Children” czar are working to bring about. In fact, while the establishment press in the United States has carefully avoided shedding light on the subject, the UN is hardly trying to conceal its radical agenda. It already has two international “legal instruments” that, according to the UN and many of its member governments, already criminalize physical discipline of children.

One is the UN CRC, a global treaty that empowers bureaucrats to decide what is in the “best interests” of a child, rather than allowing parents, who love and know their children best, to make those determinations. So far the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the dangerous UN regime. But in Scotland, as one example, the UN CRC was interpreted by lawmakers as requiring a specific, named social worker to oversee every child and his or her parents until the age of 18.

The other UN scheme, known as UN Agenda 2030, in addition to demanding global wealth redistribution and indoctrination under the guise of “education,” also deals with what it calls “violence” against children. Goal 16.2 in the scheme demands an end to “all forms of violence” against children, which in UN-speak includes corporal discipline. UN Agenda 2030, like the CRC, has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate, as required for all treaties by the U.S. Constitution. But it was signed by Obama, whose administration is acting as though the scheme had been ratified.

The UN’s Santos Pais, a member of the UN Drafting Group behind the UN CRC, has been speaking to anyone who would listen about the agenda, and making clear what it means. “Since 2006, the number of States having introduced an explicit legal ban on violence against children, including corporal punishment, has tripled,” she explained at a summit this month in Austria aimed at banning corporal punishment and criminalizing parents worldwide. “Today, more than half of the United Nations member States have either introduced the ban or firmly committed to do it. Policies to support positive parenting and early childhood initiatives and to promote zero tolerance for violence against children are taking ground in an increasing number of countries. In turn, this is helping to overcome deeply rooted social norms, attitudes and behaviors condoning violence against children.” She also celebrated Agenda 2030’s prohibition.

The conference she was speaking at crafted a resolution that vows to step up efforts to sideline parents and tell them how to raise their children — at government gunpoint if needed. Among other elements, the Conference Resolution called for implementing prohibitions on corporal punishment, which it labels “assault,” at the “international, regional and national levels.” The scheme also called for “comprehensive dissemination” of information on the ban, “promotion of positive, non-violent forms of discipline,” and “public and parent education.” In other words, tax-funded government propaganda aimed at parents with instructions on how the UN thinks they should raise their children. Finally, the document called for establishing a massive “data collection system” to make sure parents around the world are all raising their children in accordance with UN decrees.

Unfortunately, by equating “violence against children” with reasonable physical punishment offered lovingly by parents as a disciplinary measure, Santos Pais does a tremendous disservice to the many innocent children who face real violence and abuse. To even compare the two is to cruelly and heartlessly cheapen, downplay, and exploit the massive amounts of real suffering endured by children around the world. Indeed, comparing loving parents who use corporal punishment to help teach their children with adults who beat, torture, rape, and truly harm children is demagoguery of the most vile sort. Yet American taxpayer funds continue to support the UN’s propaganda campaign that does precisely that.

In what might be seen as twisted bit of irony, it seems children around the world — and especially in Africa — have much more to fear from the UN’s brutal “peacekeeping” forces than they do from their own parents. As documented extensively by this magazine and even official UN reports, international troops on UN “peace” missions have been savagely exploiting and raping children around the world for decades across every region of the world except Antarctica. Most recently, a high-ranking UN human-rights whistleblower who tried to stop the rape of children as young as eight and nine by “peace” troops in the Central African Republic had to resign in the face of what he called “impunity” among top UN officials.

The UN Charter prohibits UN interference in the internal affairs of member states. It should go without saying that family affairs, then, are way outside the bounds of anything that could be considered even remotely legitimate. Whether corporal punishment is good or bad is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that the dictators club known as the UN is trying to turn loving parents into criminals, even as its own “peace” troops terrorize, rape, and brutalize children around the world with impunity. The hypocrisy is out of control. It is past time for Congress to pass the American Sovereignty Restoration Act to get the United States out of the UN.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].