Are Parents Endangering Their Children with SUVs?
Keith Bradsher has written a book (which this writer has not read), High and Mighty: SUVs–The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, which (as you might suspect) does not look favorably on SUVs. Stephanie Mencimer reviews the book for The Washington Monthly, and includes a claim about the role that SUVs play in fatalities involving young children that doesn’t stand up very well to scrutiny.
Mencimer writes,
Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that’s illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his two-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he’d hit the curb.
Of course to evaluate the claim that “SUVs are particularly dangerous for children” we would need actual statistics rather than an isolated anecdote. Just how big of a problem is parents running over their own children? And to what extent do SUVs and other large vehicles play in this problem?
Whether or not the answers to this question appear in Bradsher’s book, I cannot say, but Mencimer certainly appears uninterested in sharing the information necessary to obtain a better understanding of the problem.
A search for data that would substantiate this claims comes up surprisingly short, largely because the number of fatalities involved appears to be so small that nobody keeps the sort of records that would tell us how many children die when their parents run over them, much less sorted by type or size of vehicle.
Kids n’ Cars, a group centered around preventing accidents involving children left unattended around cars, appears to be the only group tracking national statistics of such incidents, but even their efforts aren’t enough to allow us to address Mencimer’s claims adequately.
According to Kids n’ Cars, in the 5 year period from 1997-2001, there were at least 358 fatalities that involved unattended children around a vehicle. Of those, 115 fatalities involved children being run over by a car. So, during that period, an average of 23 children were killed when they were backed over by a car.
But how many of those involve SUVs and how many involve a parent-child relationship?
According to an interview with Kids n’ Cars’ Janette Fennell, 70 percent of such fatalities involved large vehicles, such as trucks, vans and SUVs. Fennell also claimed that about 50 percent of such fatalities involve parents running over their children.
For the sake of argument lets just assume that every time a parent fatally backs over his or her child, they are always driving an SUV. That would mean that from 1997-2001, there were on average 12 parents annually who ran over and killed their own young children with SUVs. Given that as of 1997 there were approximately 13.8 million SUVs registered in the United States (and there were likely close to 20 million by the end of 2001), 12 fatalities is certainly a tragedy but hardly much of a “troubling trend.”
If we look at all of these fatalities, the bottom line is there were still only 115 such fatalities in five years involving a class of vehicles which had approximately 60 million registrations as of 1997. Installing a swimming pool is far more dangerous — about 350 children under 5 die annually from drowning in residential swimming pools.
Sources:
CPSC Warns: Pools Are Not the Only Drowning Danger at Home for Kids. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, May 23, 2002.
SUV Registrations Nearly Double in Five Years, Census Bureau Reports. Census Bureau, October 19, 1999.
More tots being run over, killed. Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 2002.
Statistics. KidsNCars.Org, Accessed: 12/7/2002.
Tags: Uncategorized