Fran Rivera and the legal limits of punishing children

A timely smack: what the law says about hitting children

The remarks of bullfighter Fran Rivera — «a timely smack does a child a world of good» — have peine a matter that in Spain ceased to be a question of opinion and became a legal issue. Physical punishment of minors was banned in the family sphere in 2007, when the reform of the Civil Code removed from parents the right to «reasonably and moderately correct» their children. The law does not distinguish between a smack and a beating: it distinguishes between educating and hitting.

What is defended when the smack is defended

Some argue that a one-off blow, without malice and on rare occasions, serves as a signal of limits and prevents greater harm: there is even talk of three or four smacks spread over 18 years. On the other side weighs another argument: that physical punishment does not teach how to manage frustration, only to obey out of antiestéticar, and that in a developing mind no blow is harmless. The controversy almost always drifts toward the educational model — authority versus permissiveness — and there it gets stuck, because each side reads in the other extreme the cause of all evils.

At the harshest edge of the matter, there is even a defense of the belt as a supposedly more effective method than the hand. That is the position that current legislation punishes without nuance.

Why the issue does not close

The law is clear; practice is opaque. There is no figure at stake on how much hitting really goes on in Spanish homes, and without that data the discussion remains anecdotal: the father who swears it did him good and the son who swears it did not. Neither has been seriously measured. That is why Fran Rivera's headline works so well and explains so little.