Yes. In the same session this morning I thought this was an interesting question raised by a parent, on the rights of the child side of things, where if a parent offers a child two forms of punishment because that child has done something that they know they shouldn't have, and they're given the option of, 'You can have a quick smack and a cwtch, or you're going to your bedroom for quarter of an hour', and the child is allowed to choose and the child chooses the smack, what happens then? I'm not offering any views on the fact that this choice has been given, but it was put to us today about how would that fall in the law once it were changed.
That's a really interesting question. There is a body of law that—
A child can't consent to assault.
Yes, you can't consent to a serious assault, apart from in certain—. The law is really quite difficult. So, for example, tattooing is a serious assault on one level, but you can consent to a tattoo. I can think of one case where a man branded his initials on a woman's buttocks, but she consented to it and the Court of Appeal held that they could consent to that. I can also think of a series of cases, which I won't get into here, that involve sadomasochistic behaviour between adults, some of which was really serious, and involved people willingly applying themselves to things that no sane person would do. And the Court of Appeal in that case, a case called Brown, said, 'No, that's going too far—you can't consent to that.' Then, you may have seen there was a case from the midlands recently where a gentleman operating a tattoo parlour was also involved in body surgery—splitting people's tongues. That went too far as well. So, there is again—I referred before to the spectrum of offending, and there is a clear spectrum of offending that you can realistically consent to and then you get to offending you can't consent to. So, the law has considered that in some depth. I'm still not entirely clear, and I speak as a lawyer. When it comes to much lesser assaults, the law is more unclear as to what you can consent to.