Nicole Morgan, aged 13, Bullers Wood School, Kent
Find out more about the award
Back in January, we announced the Young Human Rights Reporter of the Year 2011 competition. Learnnewsdesk (the Guardian's news website for schools) ran the competition in partnership with Amnesty International UK. We asked children aged seven to 14 to write up to 250 words on a human rights story.
Nicole's winning article is called Ban corporal punishment in the UK!
Everyone is entitled to human rights, including children. Unfortunately, there are many children who suffer major violation of their rights. In the UK parents are still allowed to use "reasonable chastisement" to punish their children.
One of them was a 14 year-old British boy who was beaten by his stepfather. At the UK courts, the stepfather was acquitted. The beating was permitted under the UK law as "reasonable chastisement", but the boy was later awarded £10,000 in damages, as the judges in Strasbourg, at European Court of Human Rights, ruled that he was abused.
Although this happened in 1998, sadly, corporal punishment is still widely used in the UK and many children are regularly physically punished and abused at home.
Physical abuse is causing more violence and criminality. Parents who physically punish their children are showing them that violence is 'OK'; therefore, they may become hitters themselves.
I feel that physical punishment has no place in a civilised society. Our challenge should be to stop all forms of child abuse.
The 21st century should be the century when we in the UK achieve a change of law, which will make corporal punishment of children illegal.
This will change the culture of parenting in the UK and will follow the 29 countries in the world, where corporal punishment is illegal, and children have the same rights against assault as adults. I believe that this will make our society a better and safer place to live, giving us a brighter future!