Scotland’s announcement this past week that it will ban all smacking of children has reignited a long-running debate over corporal punishment. Britain remains one of only four countries in Europe where smacking children is legal — as long as it meets an ambiguous definition of “reasonable punishment.”

Despite this, British movements against corporal punishment have flexed impressive muscle in recent decades: they have seen it off in the courts (1948), in the navy (1957), in prisons (1967), in state schools (1987), and, more recently, in private schools (2003). Indeed, the only institution where it remains legal is the one which stirs the most controversy — the private home.

Anthropologist Geoffry Gorer noted in his survey of “English Character” in the early 1950s that the British had a peculiar proclivity for the “pleasures of severity” when it came to punishing their children. As its use was gradually prohibited across Europe over the course of the century, Britain remained defiant. Attempts to end the practice were once castigated and dismissed as a symptom of revolutionary fervor, most notably in the period after the Soviet Union abolished it in schools in 1917. But the corporal punishment debate was actually at its most revolutionary in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it wasn’t adults leading the fight.