This is a little bit of a darker blog entry today. But I find it very disturbing to see this story in the British press about violence done by children over there to some of their peers and to see how the narrator of the video embedded on the page wants to put the story in the frame of reference that the child was evil.

I have a very simple answer for the British people. If you don't want children to learn violence, don't allow their parents to do violence to them. Every Western country has laws against assault - but most of them make exceptions when it comes to children. Laws allow children to be assaulted - in the usa we call this "spanking," and in New Zealand they call it "smacking".

Extend the laws which forbid assault so that they protect children, and you will never see this sort of thing happen again.

Parents who spank their children are not correcting them - that's an old wives' tale. Instead, they are teaching them to do violence. And violence they will do.

I have seen this effect myself... I lived for a while with a family where the father was spanking his child regularly... and I saw clearly how mean the young boy was when he played with his peers.