A smacking ban would not have saved Sara Sharif

The brutality 10-year-old Sara Sharif endured over the course of her short life is impossible to comprehend. This week, her father and stepmother were found guilty of murder, while her uncle was found guilty of allowing her to die. Over the course of the trial, the full extent of the horrendous abuse little Sara suffered came to light. A post-mortem examination found that she sustained dozens of injuries, including ‘probable human bite marks’, an iron burn and scalding from hot water.

At the start of the trial, back in October, prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC told jurors at the Old Bailey that a bloodstained cricket bat, a rolling pin with Sara’s DNA on it, a metal pole, a belt and rope were found near the family’s outhouse. So too were plastic bags bound with parcel tape. Traces of Sara’s blood were found in bins at the family’s property. These were homemade hoods that had been ‘placed over Sara’s head and taped in place’. Her stepmother sent text messages to her sisters informing them that ‘[Sara is] covered in bruises, literally beaten black’. ‘Poor girl can’t walk’, she wrote.

Neighbours say they heard screams. Two days before Sara’s death, one woman reported hearing ‘a single high-pitched scream, which lasted a couple of seconds and stopped suddenly’. Teachers noted that Sara started wearing a hijab to school, probably to cover up the bruises on her face.

When Sara died in August last year, her tortured, lifeless body was placed in a bunk bed, before her father, stepmother, uncle and siblings fled to Pakistan. Only once safely there did her father phone the police in the UK. ‘I legally punished her and she died’, he told an emergency call handler. When pushed for details, he replied that ‘she was naughty’ and ‘I beat her up, it wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much’. Four weeks into the trial, he said five words that sealed his fate: ‘She died because of me.’

Now that the trial is over there will no doubt be an inquiry into how Sara’s suffering went unnoticed for so long. There are surely lessons to be learnt. Why did none of the neighbours report hearing screams to the authorities? Why did no one come to Sara’s aid? Why was no one more curious about her suddenly wearing a hijab, especially given no other woman in her family wore one? Why were social services not immediately involved when Sara was withdrawn from school, months before her death?

Many of those seeking to draw lessons from Sara’s death are not asking these questions, however. They have another target in mind: smacking. In a sense, her father’s snivelling justification for the horrific violence he inflicted on his daughter – that it was ‘legal punishment’ – is being taken at face value.

The children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, has demanded a change in the law in light of Sara’s murder. ‘The outdated defence in assault law that permits “reasonable chastisement” of children must be removed as a matter of urgency, through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill being introduced to parliament imminently’, she said this week. She also accused Sara’s father of hiding ‘behind our legal system’ to justify his cruelty.

Even before the trial had concluded, the Observer went further, featuring a piece by columnist Catherine Bennett that initially carried the headline: ‘How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?’ It was amended after readers pointed out that Sara was not killed by ‘smacking’, but had actually suffered 11 fractures to her spine and had signs of a traumatic brain injury. She had been strangled until a bone in her neck broke.

Taking aim at opponents of a smacking ban, Bennett wrote: ‘There really are people dedicated to the cause of lawfully inflicting pain on children.’ Does she really think that if smacking was against the law Sara would still be alive today? Or that when her abusers pressed hot irons into her skin, they believed themselves to be on the right side of the law?

What happened to Sara clearly went far, far beyond the realms of ‘reasonable chastisement’ or ‘lawful punishment’, as the law currently allows. All parents know the difference between smacking and beating, between reasonable punishment and torture, between discipline and murder. Of course they do. Countless generations of children have made it to adulthood having been smacked for misbehaving as a child. Millions of children are still disciplined in this way today.

Smacking may not be the punishment of choice of self-declared parenting experts. It is certainly not the way those gluttons for punishment who identify as ‘gentle parents’ chastise their children. But for many parents, it is a quick means of enforcing their will. No one who has watched a mum attempting to wrestle her baby into the car while her toddler runs full speed around a car park can deny it – a smack is an effective way of bringing a potentially dangerous situation under control. Changing the law won’t stop this. It will just add an extra layer of worry and guilt on to already exhausted parents. Ultimately, all a smacking ban will really achieve is to further erode parental authority. And, in the long run, this undermining of adults is far worse for children than a slap on the wrist.

We need to be clear about this. Sara Sharif did not die because the law in England permits smacking or because ‘legal punishment’ got out of hand, as her father claimed. She died because a brutal, sadistic, inhumane campaign of abuse was waged against her. Those now attempting to exploit her death to further their own pet political cause should be ashamed of themselves. They risk turning one horrific, tragic loss of life into an attack on all families.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.