The Norm Chronicles (9 page)

Figure 8:
MicroMorts per year for accidental injury, including transport, by age, in 2010, England and Wales

Equal to crude rates of death per 1 million population. Not including ‘hospital misadventure’, which we discuss in
Chapter 23
.

For people who feel this way, it is the potential ‘what if?’ – maybe the maximum imaginable ‘what if?’ – that they will do just about anything to minimise – that weighs far more than any odds. So it’s no surprise that probabilities sometimes cut no ice, no matter how low, especially if the emotional stakes include children.

Still, let’s remind ourselves – again – that the probabilities are lower than ever. As with mortality overall and also with murder, children are far less likely than any other age group to suffer accidental death.
*

Old age, not childhood, is by far the most dangerous time for what the ONS calls avoidable accidental death.
⁵
The accident rate for over-85s
is so high that it would smash two and a half times through the top of this graph. We couldn’t fit it on without making the risk to most other age groups vanish into the axis. For women, the clear trend is that death from accidental injury becomes more likely with age. For men, the trend is not quite so smooth, bucked in early adulthood and middle age by a taste for thrills that are bound to cause a few casualties.

If we highlight in these overall figures just the accidental deaths caused by transport, it’s a slightly different story for young people. The old are still among the most vulnerable, but the 15–19s are now up among the highest.

Figure 9:
MicroMorts per year by age for transport accidents in England and Wales, 2010, equal to crude rates of death per 1 million population

Note the different scale to
Figure 8
.

But as before, children aged under 15 are far less likely to die in a transport accident – which includes being hit by cars – than any other age group.

Many risks to children have fallen sharply over the last 50 years. You’ve probably met the carefree-youth bore with his ‘I-used-to-roam-around-all-day-and-we-got-up-to-all-sorts-dodging-traffic/bullies/the-local-flasher-and-it-never-did-me-no-’arm’. Rose-tinted memories of
childhood are a constant. Two out of two of the authors of this book might even have been caught expressing them. But they are often wrong. Many changes are clear-cut, and road accidents are a good example.

Watching a post-war Central Office of Information film, with men in hats and women in coats with big shoulders, reminds us how much roads have changed. In 1951 there were fewer than 4 million registered vehicles on the roads in Britain. They meandered the highways free of restrictions such as road-markings, traffic calming, MOT certificates for roadworthiness or low-impact bumpers. Children played in the streets and walked to school. The result was that 907 children under 15 were killed on the roads in 1951, including 707 pedestrians and 130 cyclists.
⁶

Even this was less than the 1,400 a year killed before the war.
⁷
.

The carnage had dropped to 533 child deaths in 1995, to 124 in 2008, to 81 in 2009, and in 2010 to 55 – each a tragedy for the family, but still a staggering 90 per cent fall over 60 years. Over the same period the number of registered vehicles went up more than eight-fold, to 34 million.
⁸
If we assume a steady decline from around 1,000 deaths in 1951 to 50 now, this means an average of 450 children’s lives have been saved in each of those 60 years: that is 27,000 people alive today who would have been killed on the roads as children if accidents continued as they had in 1951.

Of course, there have been huge improvements in emergency medical treatment that mean children in accidents, who in the past would have died, now run around to get knocked down another day. This is shown by the fact that injuries have dropped, but not as fast as fatalities: in 1951, 5,743 children under 15 were seriously injured on the roads, which went down to 2,502 by 2010, a fall of 56 per cent, though there is also much argument about the accuracy of the injury figures. One figure has not changed: around two out of every three child casualties are male.

But roads are not the only hazards for children. The ONS
⁹
reports that in total in 2010, out of 9.5 million children under the age of 14 in England and Wales, 246 died of non-natural causes, of which 172 were accidents. This included 21 pedestrians, 12 cyclists, 17 car passengers, 22 by drowning, 27 by accidental strangulation and 10 in fires.

This is an average for each child of 18 MicroMorts per year from accidents.

It is remarkable that about the same number of children were drowned as were knocked down as pedestrians. There were also more accidental strangulations than drownings or pedestrian deaths: looped window-blind cords are now recognised as a particular danger for toddlers around two years old, and in 2010 IKEA withdrew over 3 million blinds for this reason.
¹⁰
But if you are a parent, of which risk are you most afraid?

This huge reduction in accidental deaths and injuries must be good. Who wants more danger for children? But it is not always easy to know why children are not killed and injured on roads. Maybe a big reason is just that they are not outside walking to school or playing. So improvements may come at a price. We can report the numbers; we can’t altogether explain them or their consequences. In 1971, about 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-olds travelled to school without an adult. By 2006 the figure had dropped to 12 per cent of seven- to ten-year-olds, with getting on for half of all primary school children arriving by car. In 1971 the average age at which children were allowed to visit friends or shops on their own was seven. In 1990 this freedom was on average first granted to ten-year-olds.

These statistics reflect a growing risk-aversion on behalf of children, detailed by Tim Gill in his 2007 book
No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society
.
¹¹
Gill suggests a number of possible reasons for this: more cars, less open space, computer games, working parents and the greater publicity given to accidents and tragedy. Clichés such as the ‘nanny state’ and ‘compensation culture’ come easily to mind, but the issue is complicated.

Take playground safety. Some post-war playground apparatus now looks as if it was designed to injure: even children of the 1950s knew to watch themselves on the witch’s hat and swingboat. In the 1970s, even before ideas of the nanny state and compensation culture took hold, the populist and popular TV programme
That’s Life
ran a campaign for safer playgrounds, demanding new apparatus and re-surfacing. As Gill points out, these expensive changes led to a reduction in play provision, initially encouraging children to play in the streets, and had little benefit in terms of reduced injuries. This may have been through the phenomenon of risk compensation: DS saw this in his child’s primary school
when some large, ancient and much-loved piece of mouldering wooden playground equipment was replaced by a bright, new and rather dull climbing frame: in the first week a child tried to extract more excitement by balancing on the top bars, fell off and broke her arm.

Other countries have not been so obsessed with playground safety, and standards are now being relaxed rather than strengthened. The problem is that it is easy to quantify the danger of allowing, or even encouraging, children to have adventurous play, not so straightforward to quantify the benefit, which is hard to prove.

Gill argues that danger can be good for kids; they have an appetite for risk and will seek it out one way or another, so it is better to teach them how to manage risky situations in the future, such as from water or traffic, without getting into trouble. This benefits healthy development; it is, to use another cliché, character-building; it encourages a sense of adventure, entrepreneurism, self-reliance, resilience and all those other fine characteristics on which Britain built her Empire.

You often hear stories of people putting a stop to any activity that seems remotely fun by citing ‘elf and safety’ to avoid the charge of failing to look after children. Even the Health and Safety Executive thinks they go too far.

If that’s not what you expect of the HSE, perhaps you’ve heard too much from its critics. But its public statements could have been written by Tim Gill. For example: ‘No child will learn about risk if they are wrapped in cotton wool’, sounds like Mr McCullough. The HSE goes on to say that it does not expect that all risks must be eliminated or continually reduced, or that every aspect of play provision ‘must be set out in copious paperwork as part of a misguided security blanket’.
¹²

We look more closely at health and safety risks in
Chapter 18
. The point here is that some low numbers for child accidents might indicate over-protection, which children pay for when they’re older but no wiser, an argument the HSE appears to accept.

The chair of the HSE, Judith Hackitt, has said: ‘Don’t use health and safety law as a convenient scapegoat or we will challenge you. The creeping culture of risk-aversion and fear of litigation … puts at risk our children’s education and preparation for adult life.’

The Countryside Alliance found that in 138 local authorities in England, over a period of ten years, there were 364 legal claims following school trips, of which 156 were successful, resulting in an average total annual payout of £293 per authority between 1998 and 2008.
¹³
Compensation culture gone mad? In the five-year period between 2006 and 2010 the HSE brought only two prosecutions involving school trips.
¹⁴

Occasionally the bad side of over-anxiety becomes clear. Obsessive use of suncream on children, or lack of outdoor activity in the sun, can lead to vitamin D deficiency, with the result that rickets, once thought to have been almost eliminated in the UK, is becoming an established disease of Middle England. Kellogg’s even proposed to fortify its children’s breakfast cereal with vitamin D, citing research which showed a 140 per cent increase between 2001 and 2009 in the number of British children under ten admitted to hospital with rickets.
¹⁵

Tim Gill calls for a change from a philosophy of protection, in which every accident is seen as someone’s failure, to a philosophy of resilience, meaning the ability to thrive in a world in which bad things happen.

As he says, ‘Childhood includes some simple ingredients: frequent unregulated self-directed contact with people and places beyond the immediate spheres of family and school, and the chance to learn from their mistakes.’

Although children in the UK are more protected from accidents than ever before, the same cannot be said of all children everywhere. Road traffic accidents are the second most common cause of death of children aged between 5 and 14 worldwide, and the most common cause for 15- to 29-year-olds. An estimated 240,000 children a year are killed on the roads in developing countries. When we venture overseas, even those who encourage kids to walk to school in this country will shudder at the sight of small children in spotless uniforms, walking to school by the side of roads with thundering traffic and no protection.

6
VACCINATION

S
HE SAW PRUDENCE
turn again in the dark. Vile, black water streaked with acid poured across the girl’s path. From nowhere, grey beasts with clanking teeth began to prowl while stinging insects steamed from the undergrowth, hungry. Nettles groped for her skin. Prudence hid her eyes and backed away – and stumbled into thorns that ripped her arms with poison as she fell to the forest floor where creepy-crawlies smelt blood and skittered over her legs to pierce her with pincers. And as Prudence writhed and screamed, pricked, bitten and burned, her mother watched, lifted her foot and pressed a stiletto into her daughter’s back to hold her down.