Smoke-Free Cars: Placing Children’s Emotions

Abstract

In February 2014, MPs in the UK House of Commons voted in favour of a law making it an offence to expose children to tobacco smoke in private vehicles. This decision followed the adoption of similar rules in five other countries, as well as six US states, nine Canadian provinces and every state of Australia. While increasingly widespread, this policy initiative remains controversial. In the UK, the House of Commons vote was framed as a choice between supporting the measure in order to protect children’s health and rejecting it as practically and philosophically problematic (Mason, 2014). Perceived practical difficulties centred on anticipated problems with enforcement, while philosophical objections focused on the ban’s encroachment into private space and attempt to compel behavioural change. One MP, Claire Perry, represented the choice in terms of a conflict between emotion and reason: ‘Heart says “ban it”, head says “unenforceable bad law”’ (Mason, 2014). While providing succinct insight into one legislator’s mindset, this comment also reproduced a binary distinction between emotion and reason — something that has long informed efforts to ‘banish’ the former from public life (Williams, 2001). Specifically, it presented the protection of children’s health against the risks of exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) as a principally emotional issue — in contrast to the rational public policy concern for enforceability, a requirement of ‘good law’.