The contradictions in our midst

Jul 17, 2012 Editorial

The law is often in conflict with the rights of an individual giving the impression that at any given there are two laws concerning a single episode. There is a law which precludes men from wearing women’s clothing and vice versa. The result is that from time to time men are charged with cross dressing. In fact, not so long ago a city magistrate imposed a fine in keeping with the law.
Correspondingly, women are never ever charged with appearing in public in men’s clothing. This was attempted nearly four decades ago but a group of women, among them the wife of the then Prime Minister, the Minister of Information and other women politicians, donned pants suits, a common wear among women, walked into the court where this matter was being heard and took their seats. Never again was any woman challenged about wearing men’s apparel.
But the way is still not clear for men to do so even the constitution stipulates that there should be no discrimination and the constitution is the supreme law. Therefore, while the law is clear, it conflicts with the constitution.
The alternative in this case is for the victim to move to the High Court with a constitutional motion to get any conviction overturned. For reasons rooted in financial embarrassment the people so affected do not challenge the lower court ruling or conviction and they come from the lower end of the economic scale.
This situation is now repeated in the issue of corporal punishment. There is no law that says that corporal punishment is illegal and indeed, over the years many parents have not hesitated to spare the rod in an effort to curb a child from his or her errant ways.
Corporal punishment was also a part of the education system to the point that an instrument for whipping was in every school including the nation’s premier Queen’s College.
The sentencing policy in the courts included a whipping for certain offences. The law had already been amended to remove the cat-o-nine tails from the punishment regime on the grounds that it represented unnecessary cruelty. Whipping, however, still remains on the statutes but the courts rarely impose sentences accompanied by whipping.
Then came the United Nations and the issue of the rights of children. There was the argument that children have rights. Further, non-governmental organizations, supporting the move by the United Nations to stamp out violence began to produce arguments that corporal punishment was a means of perpetuating violence in the society. The argument that children exposed to violence were likely to become violent adults began to take root. Correspondingly, the move to have corporal punishment removed from the statutes gained momentum. But the police have been known to visit criminals with a violence often known to reside in the armoury of the criminals themselves. The offshoot is that parents have been overheard to say that they would rather visit their children with the punishment rather than to allow them to go astray and have the police impose the punishment.
However, there is now a development that conflicts with the law and this has to do with the Rights of the Child Commission. The commission says that no child should be exposed to violence. This seems to be the law because the courts are sending parents to prison for administering corporal punishment.
This seems unfair because during a spate of consultations even children objected to the abolition of corporal punishment. Parents are now the victims of trying to ensure that their children do not lapse into anti-social behaviour.
So where do we go from here. The law does not rule out corporal punishment but the rights of the child rules out such a punishment against the child and the courts seem to be coming down on the side of those rights.
Parents cannot appeal any sentence, except perhaps on the grounds of severity. What we fear is that the same thing will happen as did in the school system when the Education Ministry when it announced a policy that no child would be left behind.
Children, concerned only with being promoted from one class to another, refused to work and there was precious little teachers could do. Now parents feel that they are being placed in a similar bind.

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The contradictions in our midst

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