The Effects of the "No Spanking Law" on Child Abuse in Sweden

There are many forms of child abuse in the world, and a number of governments have developed their own legal definitions of what constitutes child abuse. Sweden established its famous "anti-spanking" law in 1979 and clarified its stance on physical punishment and child abuse. In this paper, I will discuss the Sweden's 1979 prohibition of physical punishment of children, child abuse prevention, demographics, risk factors, statistics, and the subsequent social effects of child abuse. My research is based primarily on academic articles describing studies of police reports, child abuse laws, social services, social policies, and public awareness.

In the 1970s, concern about physical child abuse impelled Sweden to take action in response to a major research project which had concluded that stopping all physical punishment was the key to preventing physical child abuse in general (Haeuser 1990). In 1979, Sweden passed a law that "a child may not be subjected to physical punishment or other injurious or humiliating treatment" (Haeuser 1990; Lindell & Svedin 2001; Lindell & Svedin 2004; Ziegert 1983). The law aimed not only to promote positive childrearing for all children, but to deter physical child abuse (Haeuser 1990). With this law, all physical punishment of children, whether mild or severe, was banned (Haeuser 1990).

In his report on the Swedish prohibition of corporal punishment, Ziegert (1983) states that the core starting point of the ban was the "psychologically and sociologically assumed connection between corporal punishment, domestic violence and child abuse" (917). In addition, Norma D. Feshbach (1980), Ph.D. and Chair of the APA task force on Rights of Children and Youth, asserts [T]he use of physical punishment or violence directed toward children is very close to the abuse of children. It is often difficult to differentiate violence from abuse, just as it is difficult to legally establish the precise point at which corporal punishment becomes child abuse (111).

Sweden was the first industrial society to "fully adopt and give legal backing to the basic recommendations of a total ban on the exercise of physical force on children made by pediatricians, child psychologists, and other scientists" (Ziegert 1983:917). While physical discipline may not always be considered equivocal to physical child abuse, they seem to be dynamically linked.

When the "spanking law" was passed, it was immediately followed by a far-reaching mass media campaign, including the most expensive pamphlet distribution ever organized by the Ministry of Justice; the campaign focused especially on parent training and the education of immigrants (Ziegert 1983). There are many supplementary measures provided for in the governmental bill, including information policy, parent training, activity of child protective organizations, and other support programs that provide primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention by supporting families who need help in parenting (Barth 1991; Ziegert 1983).

Contrary to some popular American beliefs, there are no criminal sanctions or legal penalties against parents and guardians who spank in Sweden. Instead, infractions are heard in civil rather than in criminal courts, and adults who violate the law are referred to counselors and other programs for support, advice, and training (Feshbach 1980). The primary purpose of the law was to establish a norm against all forms of physical punishment, with a secondary purpose to make it easier to convict those who injure children under the Swedish Criminal Code (Deley 1988). Those defendants "would find it difficult to claim innocence on grounds of merely exercising parental right to administer corporal punishment which 'accidentally' resulted in physical harm" (Deley 1988:421). Because the law prohibiting corporal punishment does not explicitly threaten legal sanctions, it "lowers the threshold of the social isolation in which child abuse may take place and opens up possibilities for preventative intervention in the case of troubled families before criminal prosecution, with all its grave disadvantages, becomes necessary" (Ziegert 1983:921).

In addition to having "the general long-term effect of changing the behavior of parents in regard to choosing methods of disciplining children", the prohibition of corporal punishment also has the "direct preventative effect of sharpening public awareness for the social problem of child abuse" (Ziegert 1983:921). Thus this law and the dense network of support systems behind it, are crucial components of the prevention of generations of child abuse in Sweden.

While spanking has no legal sanctions in Sweden, the same clearly cannot be said of child abuse. Legal sanctions for physical abuse of a child by an adult is defined in the Swedish penal code as follows:
[*]A person who inflicts bodily injury, illness or pain upon another or renders him unconscious or similarly helpless, shall be sentenced for assault to imprisonment for at most two years or , if the crime was petty, to pay a fine. If the crime is considered grave, the sentence shall be for aggravated assault to imprisonment for at least one and at most ten years (Lindell & Sveden 2001:151).

In the Lindell & Svedin (2001) study of police reports for physical child abuse, 23 percent of the children were immediately placed outside the family when the abuse was discovered. Four of the perpetrators were sentenced to prison for child abuse in the district court, while others were ordered to pay a fine and given a conditional sentence (Lindell & Svedin 2001). Twenty-nine (20 precent) of the 145 police reports for suspected physical abuse of children resulted in prosecution in the district courts and 88 percent of those perpetrators who were prosecuted were convicted (Lindell & Svedin 2001).

Certain family attributes and social problems tend to result in an increased elevated risk for parental child abuse. For example, single parents, unemployed parents, immigrant parents, or less-educated parents are two to five times more likely to be involved with social services than other types of families (Lindell & Svedin 2004). Parents who suffer from alcohol or drug addiction, mental illness, depression, or other psychiatric problems are also shown to be high-risk individuals (Lindell & Svedin 2004). In addition, those parents living in the midst of family violence and those who were abused as children themselves are at increased risk of physically abusing their own children (Lindell & Svedin 2004).

Lindell and Svedin's (2004) study of physical abuse in Sweden highlighted these findings; the parents in the study fulfilled multiple risk criteria for physical child abuse. 75 percent of the mothers and 63 percent of the fathers were unemployed outside the home, which is "nearly the opposite of the figures for the population as a whole; about 75 percent of all Swedish citizens are employed outside the home" (Lindell & Svedin 2004:347). 85 percent of the families in the study lived in rented housing compared to 36 percent of the general population (Lindell & Svedin 2004). In addition, there was a surprising gender preference toward the abuse victim; adult males tended to abuse boys and adult women tended to abuse girls (Lindell & Svedin 2004). Men were responsible for the physical abuse of 64 percent of the children, with the biological father as the primary abuser (Lindell & Svedin 2004). The mother was responsible for abuse in 21 percent of the cases, and the remaining abusers were primarily step-parents, with some personal assistants and foster parents (Lindell & Svedin 2004).

In addition to the personal, family, and social risk factors of the parents, Swedish children at risk of physical child abuse have all the risk factors that are related to the appearance, health, and behaviors of the child; "being younger, male, disabled in various functions or different from the norm are risk factors for children" (Lindell & Svedin 2004:341). Of the 113 children with case files in Lindell and Svedin's (2004) study of social service provided for physically abused children in Sweden, 59 percent were boys, and 47 percent were 0 to 6 years old and 53 percent were 7 to 14 years old (Lindell & Svedin 2004). At the time the abuse was reported, 85 percent of the children were living mainly in rented housing, 57 percent were living with both their parents, and 35 percent were living with a single parent (Lindell & Svedin 2004). The average family size included 2.9 children, and the average number of abused children per household was 1.9 (Lindell & Svedin 2004).

When it comes to types of injuries, bruises are the most common sign of physical child abuse in Sweden (Lindell & Svedin 2001). Bruises are seen in 90% of physically abused children, often accompanied by other injuries as well (Lindell & Svedin 2001). Younger children often end up getting serious injuries, such as a variety of fractures, while older children are primarily are bruised (Lindell & Svedin 2001). In Lindell & Svedin's (2001) study of police reports on physical child abuse, "[t]he range of physical abuse was broad, extending from a slap on the cheek to attempted murder. Fifty-two percent of the children showed visible physical indications or implied findings of injuries. The remaining children were either not visibly injured or not medically reviewed" (151).

Recent studies show that four to eight percent of reports to Swedish social services involve suspected physical abuse of children (Lindell & Svedin 2004). During Lindell and Svedin's (2001) study, 145 children were reported to the police as being physically abused by a parent or caregiver, resulting in a yearly incidence of 0.5 per 1000 children in the studied police district. In the geographical area of their 2004 study, 126 children under the age of 15 were reported to the police as physically abused by their parent or caregiver during 1986-1996; some had been abused several times by one or more caregivers while others had been abused only once (Lindell & Svedin 2004). The reported (not substantiated, just reported) number of child abuse and neglect cases in Sweden for 1996 were 57 per l00,000 people. By comparison, in America,

the number of cases of substantiated child maltreatment was 14 for every 1,000 people and the number of reported, but undocumented cases was 45 for every 1,000 people. Thus, converting the American figures for direct comparison with Sweden, a comparative picture of the reported incidence of child abuse in Sweden and America is as follows: Sweden - 57/l00,000;America - 4,500/100,000 (Alexis 2004:7).

Studies done in 1981 and 1988 showed significant decreases in the use of physical punishment, support of physical punishment, and numbers of cases of child abuse (Hyman 1997). Hyman (1997), director of the National Center for the Study of Corporal Punishment and Alternatives reports that only 26 percent of parents in Sweden supported spanking in 1981, and the support rate is now less than 11 percent. In Deley's (1988) comparative study of child abuse 9 years after the prohibition of corporal punishment, 10.7% of American men and 8.2% of American women sampled stated that they had been victims of child abuse as children, compared to 3.9% of Swedish men and 0% of Swedish women in the sample. Finally, according to Joan Durrant, professor of family studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada, "Sweden went from a family violence- child death rate of 18% in 1970 to 0 percent in recent years" (Hyman 1997:215).

The 1979 prohibition of physical punishment in Sweden "adopted the attitude that the lowering of the number of cases of child abuse would be realized only when every form of force exercised against children could be covered by norms of criminal law" (Ziegert 1983:920). Wllliam James, founder of the first psychology laboratory in the United States in the 1870s, stated the principle that we can use our behavior to control our attitudes and beliefs: that, in fact, behavior is easier to control than attitudes and beliefs (Lovaglia 2000). Sweden changed their laws regarding physical punishment, even when it opposed popular opinion. By changing the legal structure of society, Sweden's laws allowed their people to better parents than their initial attitudes would suggest, and since physical punishment and child abuse are so closely linked, they have made significant strides toward reducing physical child abuse in Sweden as a whole.

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