Sweden and smacking

Finally got to post this now I that blogger.com, is behaving itself.
Frogblog doesn’t want smacking. In fact he( I'm assuming she or them is/are a he) wants it banned. He wants it banned so badly that he has written a damning - yes, a damning - critique on an article I had in the New Zealand Herald on Tuesday entitled Force doesn't equal abuse, where I mentioned a study on Sweden, the first country to ban smacking. The study was called "A Generation without smacking" written by Joan Durrant and published by Save the Children. My Herald article was written in response to this article by Save the Children director John Bowis who tried, pretty woefully, to " set the record straight on the smacking debate."
Frogblog quotes the report. My comments follow.

Support for physical punishment has decreased dramatically in Sweden over the past 30 years and this decline has been accompanied by a reduction in its use.

I agree. The report actually said that support for physical punishment had decreased more before the smacking ban than after it. The smacking ban did not lead to a reduction in smacking as Froblog would like to think.

The corporal punishment ban and ongoing public education campaigns appear to have been extremely effective in altering the social climate with regard to corporal punishment

Durrant not only compared survey questions that were very different in 1981 and 1994, but she used only one or the two responses to the 1994 question that indicated qualified support for corporal punishment and if Frogblog had done his research he would know this. The original survey question was" A child has to be given corporal punishment from time to time." In 1965 53% agreed, in 1978 26% agreed and it never reduced since that year. Of course that indicates that the smacking ban did not change public attitudes on parental physical discipline as that had already happened. Changing public attitudes was the aim of the smacking legislation, and although the Durrant report says that attitudues were changed, she is not comparing apples with apples. You can get any finding you want- all you do is change the questions after legislation has been passed.

There has been no increase of parents being drawn into the criminal justice system for minor assaults. Nor has there been an increase of children being removed from parents through the intervention of social workers… These findings clearly indicate that the corporal punishment ban has not resulted in greater criminalisation of minor assaults by parents

No it doesn’t. The reason for the above is because , as the report says, no longitudal studies of use exist, so therefore there is no conclusive evidence that a ban on corporal punishment has reduced parental smacking with or without reasonable force. The relevant questions were not even asked, making the "findings" pure spin. That is why the report is flawed and contradictory. Frogblog may pay to check Durrant's sources - but he may have to take a few lessons in the Swedish language as they are all in Swedish.
PS anyone else had problems with blogger lately?