Posts encouraging physical or emotional abuse should be removed

[Eveningintheafternoon]

I don’t know if there is a policy on this but to my understanding smacking is illegal in Scotland and wales and while it isn’t illegal in England yet it isn’t generally considered acceptable.

I am on a different thread and quite a few people have ‘advised’ the OP to hit her toddler as a sanction. I am just saying here I don’t think that these posts should be permitted to be honest and wondered a) what others thought and b) if there was a policy on this.

Emotional abuse is harder to define but I would say some posts I’ve seen on here certainly fall into that category.

You are quite right about smacking.I 've not seen the thread you are talking about so can't comment on that one, but if I saw anyone advocating any physical chastisement, I'd certainly report it.

Hi there, @Eveningintheafternoon. Thanks for bringing this up. It's a tricky issue for us to moderate because, regardless of any thoughts we may have about the rights and wrongs of smacking, while it is still legal in England, we can't really delete posts solely based on someone expressing their views on the subject.

And to be honest, even if it does become illegal, it would be very difficult for us to know or prove from a post that someone had broken the law, and it would not always be our place to step in in such situations.

That said, we would of course take very seriously any case where we felt a child is in danger and we can and do alert the relevant authorities in such circumstances.

Could we ask you to report any posts to us on that thread that concern you, using the report button? This issue is so nuanced, we really need to look at each post on its individual merits, but we'd always want to see anything that worried our users, so please never hesitate to use the report button.