American Medical Association 17.

This article outlines the current state of the law on the physical discipline of children and argues the case for legal change in Australia. It also identifies the politics of the ongoing debate and its potent symbolism — claims that physical parental punishment amounts to child abuse and state-sanctioned violence, pitted against claims that parental rights and the privacy of the home will be violated by state regulation of physical punishment. All U N member states, except the United States and Somalia, have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989), which requires that signatories prohibit parental violence to children. New Zealand is the only English-speaking country that has in fact prohibited parental violence to children, in controversial legislation in 2007, although 24 other countries have also done so, Sweden being the first, in 1979. The issu