INQUIRY FINDING 12: All forms of physical and harsh verbal discipline 5 are forms of violence, which directly contribute to the prevalence of family violence and indirectly by increasing the risk of a child becoming either a perpetrator or further victim later in life. There is absolutely no doubt that the way in which children are being raised today in Samoa is a major contributor to the prevalence of family violence throughout the nation. What most call discipline actually amounts to violence and for those who are still left in any doubt they should consider why children are not afforded the same legal protection as adults. As the MoP have already highlighted in this Report, ‘assault is assault’ when talking about corporal punishment in schools. Is there any reason why it should be different in the home? “Ask yourselves – what lesson are we teaching our children by assaulting them? No child is born into this world with a violent disposition (apart from children born to drug addicts. There are exceptions.) No child comes in as a violent person. They learn it. Who are their first teachers? We are. His parents, his family. He learns violence from us. Watching our uncle, our aunty, our cousin. We learned it. You call it smacking. I call it assault. We are teaching them to assault every time we smack them. We are teaching them that assault is a way to deal with behaviour that it is acceptable to deal with problems. Then we ask ourselves why domestic violence is a big problem in this country. It is because we learn violence from a young age. We grow up believing violence is a solution to a problem. First we hit our children, then we hit our wives. It is a cycle of violence because it begins when we are young and we carry it through to when we are grown up. Violence is inbred. Children are born pure. The book of Proverbs says that if you teach children from birth they will not deviate from that teaching. If we seriously want to address domestic violence we need to stop smacking our children and using abusive language that causes emotional harm. I think that is where we should start.” Justice Vui Clarence Nelson, Supreme Court judge, Inquiry public hearings The Inquiry has found a plethora of supporting evidence to suggest that Justice Vui is correct in his summary, which is unsurprising given his wealth of knowledge on the matter gained from both his role as Supreme Court and Family Court judge, and as a member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The act of sasa or smacking, if done on another adult would be classified as assault under Samoan law and in almost any other country worldwide. Article 15 of Samoa’s Constitution provides the right to equality before the law. Allowing children to be smacked but not adults is not equality before the law and therefore is unconstitutional. Indeed it appears as though both MoP and AGO already agree that corporal punishment in the home constitutes assault. Their advice to MESC determines physical discipline of children by teachers to constitute assault. Given teachers are included in section 14 of the Infants Ordinance 1961 in being allowed to administer ‘reasonable punishment’, alongside parents, the 5Definition at Info Point 6.