Tom Sutcliffe: It should never be OK to hit children

Being hit by a hand you know doesn't hurt less than being hit by a hand you don't

How exactly do you conjugate a smack, a slap and an outright assault? What mood and what tense will tip a blow from admonition to abuse? In an increasing number of European countries the ability to parse such violence accurately has already become redundant because they've outlawed the smacking of children – and it is only with children, it's worth remembering, that we still have a need for this skill. With anybody else, a slap is an assault and that's that. With children, though, a smack still has to be carefully weighed and placed on a continuum which has one end in legality and the other end in a criminal court. Somewhere along that imaginary line what is "reasonable" and defensible will flip – without any intermediary stage – into what is not.

The Council of Europe doesn't think this makes a lot of sense and, as was widely reported yesterday, is going to try and persuade the UK to apply in practice what it already acknowledges in theory: that it's not a good idea to hit children. Though we have a partial ban in place and are about to close an eccentric loophole in that law which allows private tutors to whack their pupils ("reasonably") our right to cuff our own children is still protected. Sir Roger Singleton, the Government's independent adviser on child safety, recently published a report – Physical Punishment: Improving Consistency and Protection – which essentially recommended that smacking should be banned everywhere except in the home, by parents and those in loco parentis.

That's a relatively easy bit of the conjugation for most people, I expect. First person and third person. I may smack my son but you will assault him. It's the simple transformative rule that governs the plot of Christos Tsiolkas' engrossing novel The Slap, which details the reverberations of an unlicenced physical rebuke administered at a Melbourne barbecue. For Harry, who administers the slap, it's a long-overdue corrective to an odious little brat who has just kicked him in the shin. For Rosie, whose indulged son receives the slap, it's a psychopathic assault that leads to a law case. And even those who'd itched to administer a slap themselves are forced, reluctantly, to concede that Harry overstepped the mark.

I guess that everyone will recognise this demarcation – worn into the grass by custom and still recognised in current British law. And most people will bow to its instinctive authority. My child, my rules. But I confess that I can't see logically why it should be different. Being hit by a hand you know doesn't hurt less than being hit by a hand you don't. It's as if we're far more worried by a potential infringement of parental jurisdiction than by the assault itself. And of course you can argue that "assault" is an absurd term for a quick smack on the back of the legs, but if you do argue that, where would you like to draw the line on what other people can do? (I understand, naturally, that you would never hurt a child).

In his report, Sir Roger makes it clear that he thinks there should be "no scope to conceal reality by dissembling with words", pointing out that the innocuous-sounding "clip round the ear" could cover a damaging blow to the head. And yet he repeatedly uses the phrase "mild smack" himself. What's mild, exactly? And how do you measure it after the event? The truth is that "mild" itself is a bit of dissembling – to get us round the fact that a distinction we defend as "reasonable" and "just common sense" doesn't make much sense at all.

I doubt that Ed Balls protects the current position as "sensible and proportionate" because he wants to retain the right to hit his own children occasionally. He does it because he knows there's a world of political grief in telling people what they are and aren't allowed to do to theirs. Sometimes grief is worthwhile, though. If "common sense" is to be allowed to do its fudging, let it do it at the point where the Crown Prosecution Service has to decide whether to get involved, not within the law where it sends out the message that a bad, inadequate and potentially damaging kind of discipline is actually a kind of parental caring. If you aren't allowed to hit my children – and you're not – then I can't honestly see why I should be allowed to either.

Hot tips for readers

Craig Mod, a thoughtful commentator on what electronic books should and could be, proposes a seductive idea in an article about some of their current shortcomings . He calls it a "heat map", the idea being that it should be possible, once e-books become commonplace, for lots of individual readers to aggregate their experience of a text, so that you could identify those passages that collective wisdom had identified as particularly pertinent. Flick a switch and hot passages would actually show up, blushing deeper scarlet than the surrounding text. And if you think that "collective wisdom" is an oxymoron and you want your book to remain dispassionately cool throughout, what about an option that allowed you to access Martin Amis's notes on a new novel, say, or Jeanette Winterson's?

There are all sorts of possibilities that would effectively mean that e-books weren't a depleted form of hard copy but a gateway to a new kind of reading. Such notions aren't entirely without precedent in the world of dead-wood publishing, of course. When I was at school, we employed a kind of heat map for books that were known to contain potentially titillating material (quite a broad category for the hair-trigger libido of a 14-year-old boy). The book would be placed, spine down, on a desk and gently allowed to fall open – usually splaying itself wantonly at the point of maximum "hotness". The great advantage of the electronic version of this process is that it could be a lot more high-minded.

For further reading go to: Craig Mod: gizmodo.com/5522341/how-to-fix-todays-ebook-readers