Parents ignore child safety

By CATHERINE MASTERS


The two women in the front seats of the first car were fully belted up, safe and sound, nice and legal.

The two toddlers were loose in the back seat, snuggled close together with no child restraints in sight.

They gazed around with big eyes wondering why the police had pulled the car over. They looked small, vulnerable and breakable.

The grandmother in the passenger seat began to explain. Her husband was ill, her daughter had left her grandchild with her but did not drop off the car seat. She had been in a hurry. It wasn't a good time for her.

Then the driver got angry and told her to wind the window up and stop talking to the bloody Herald.

The woman in the next car - pulled over during the police crackdown on child restraints yesterday morning in Otahuhu - screwed up her face and scratched her head, as three small children sat loose in the back of the car and an adult watched. Another child sat in the front passenger seat.

There wasn't enough space, the unlicensed mother said. Then, it was my husband's car, she was just helping her friend, she did not normally drive, they were in a hurry because of "church stuff".

By the end of the crackdown the excuses were wearing thin. But, as Counties Manukau West area commander Inspector Bruce Bird says, when it comes to child safety, there is no excuse.

Although the people given tickets for allowing their children to be unsafe in a car seemed of low socio-economic background and not well educated, this cut no sway with the inspector.

"They might not have university degrees but they're pretty streetwise - and they know they have done wrong.

"Maybe affordability is an issue, but if they can afford a car they can afford the proper seats. If they can't afford it they should catch the bus."


Mr Bird has seen what can happen to children who are unrestrained. The first fatality he had to attend as a young police officer more than 20 years ago is still with him.

It was the needless death of a little boy unrestrained in the back of the car as his parents sat buckled up in the front.

"It was just a complete and utter waste of life. I just looked and thought how could that be taken away from a person who had their whole life in front of them just because some parents couldn't be bothered clicking in a seat."

The car had rolled down a bank and the child was tossed and turned inside it. The parents were fine, their child dead.

After all these years he finds it staggering that so many people still do not bother to make sure their children are safely buckled in.

When they are pulled up and questioned about why they are in a seat belt but their child is not, they tend to look stunned and guilty, he says.


In the past two days the South Auckland crackdown has caught 87 people with unrestrained children aged under 5 in their cars.

National figures from the Land Transfer Safety Authority show that 86 per cent of people are restraining children properly, which leaves 14 per cent who are not - about 30,000 children under 5, or one in seven.

Almost 100 children under five have been killed in road crashes in the past 10 years and police estimate 26 would have lived had they been in appropriate child restraints.

Nearly two weeks ago a dead unrestrained baby was found in her mother's lap in a Northland crash which claimed four lives.

The deaths, though, are just the start. Many more children are injured by not being restrained.

The Fire Service is at the frontline of cutting children out of wrecked cars. David Neil, the assistant fire commander for Auckland, says people should not under-estimate how dangerous it is to forget or not to bother to buckle children in.

"They are like a missile. They'll take off and hit the seat in front or they'll go through the windscreen or hit a passenger in front. Their bodies are so little and they break so easily."