No accident

PINOY KASI

No accident

By Michael Tan

InquirerLast updated 01:18am (Mla time) 10/18/2006

Published on Page A13 of the October 18, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

SOME of my friends cried after reading the front-page article in the Inquirer last Oct. 7 about six Muslim children who were killed in a fire in Taytay town.
Five of the six children were siblings, the parents away at the time of the fire because they had been detained on drug-related charges. The parents could not attend the burial, which by Muslim tradition has to take place on the day of death, because the authorities said there was no court order to allow the parents out.
Normally, you'd hear an outpouring of public concern, but this time around not even politicians came out with condolences or offers of assistance. I have heard nothing more about the incident, the dead children now part of the cold statistics of accidental deaths.
4,000 deaths
After reading about the Taytay accident, I checked statistics from the Department of Health's yearbooks and confirmed my suspicion: after infectious diseases, accidents are the second leading cause of death for children up to the age of 14. Among 15- to 19-year-olds, accidents become the leading cause of death.
The figures vary from year to year, but on average, about 4,000 deaths from accidents are reported annually for Filipino children. Two types of accidents account for about 70 percent of all deaths. Predictably, one group consists of motor vehicle traffic accidents. The other, which actually claims more lives than motor vehicles, are accidents described as those "caused by submersion, suffocation and foreign bodies." I suspect most of these deaths are from drowning; in fact, the 2006 DOH statistics will eventually include three deaths from that Taytay community. Only a week before the fire, three siblings had drowned during Typhoon "Milenyo."
I should mention that besides those 4,000 annual deaths, there are another 2,000 young victims of homicides, which can be accidental or intentional.
What's happening then is that we save children from infectious diseases through immunization and treatment of the sick, only to lose so many of them to accidents and to violence. Let's not forget, too, that many of those who do survive accidents may suffer from serious disabilities, sometimes for life.
Dumber?
Every time a kid darts across the street and nearly gets killed, our family driver mutters something about kids being "mas tanga" [dumber] these days. There's a paradox here since we marvel constantly at how techie-smart kids can be able to handle cell phones and the Internet and all kinds of electronic gadgets.
So why can't they cross the street properly? Why do candles become so deadly in their hands? And for a country surrounded by the sea, why is it that so many kids can't swim?
Maybe the problem isn't kids being dumber now, but adults being still in denial about the many new needs we have around child safety. Let's try to answer the questions I raised in the previous paragraph, to put those needs in context.
We think traffic accidents are inevitable because there are more vehicles, but really, the heavy traffic may have actually prevented even more deaths, given that cars can't run too fast. But yes, kids still get killed, and the problem is that they have no choice but to be out in the streets. And slow as the cars may be, they can still kill a child especially when you have a driver under the influence of alcohol or "shabu" ["crack"]. I've actually seen cars accelerating when they see a pedestrian crossing.
The fires? A toppled candle becomes deadly in a shanty, filled with combustible materials. The risks of dying in a fire are amplified because in our urban jungles, parents lock their children in when they go off to work, sometimes without any caregiver, or at best, assigning an older child to care for the younger ones. Fearful of burglars, we've alsotransformed homes -- even the poorest of households -- into virtual prisons with locks and grills so that when there's a fire, both adults and children are unable to escape.
The Taytay tragedy reminds us that the problems are compounded with migrant communities. Back in their rural hometowns, migrants can depend on the entire community to help watch the children. In the cities, even as family sizes grow (the five Taytay siblings were aged 2 to 7), the social support system shrinks.
When rural people are transplanted into the urban jungle, life becomes extremely perilous for children. With cramped living space, homes become minefields, with pesticides, kerosene and other poisons stored in soft drink bottles alongside foodstuff. And in a culture that is in love with guns, it's not unusual to have loaded guns lying around in homes. Traditional wisdom falls apart, with parents having little to pass on to their children by way of safety lessons, except to admonish them to behave.
What to do?
Safety awareness needs to be incorporated into school curricula. Even very young children need safety awareness, and can be taught simple but life-saving skills, including something as basic as handling candles. Safety awareness needs to be taught throughout the elementary and high school levels, related to practical life skills.
But beyond the schools, I hope communities will begin to think of what to do about child safety, not by further sequestering children and locking them into homes, but by transforming the environment for both children and adults.
Shortly before the Taytay tragedy, I was already thinking of doing a column about child safety, inspired by an excellent documentary on BBC featuring Unicef-supported programs in Bangladesh. There are teams that go around organizing community assemblies to discuss the most recent fatal accidents and mobilizing the community to take action. Sometimes all it takes is covering a well to prevent children from falling in. In other cases, it may take more effort, like swimming lessons for rural kids. I was amazed at how they'd improvise to turn a river into a teaching pool, with volunteers handling the swimming lessons.
We need to be comprehensive in reviewing the causes of the accidents. I'd point out that sometimes the new risks are inadvertent side effects of some very positive social changes. We complain that today's children are more "malikot" (loosely translated, unruly) but some of that might actually be due to improved nutritional status, as well as theindependence we encourage in them.
Our safety programs need to anticipate needs. With Christmas approaching, we have to begin warning the public about the market being flooded again with substandard electrical gadgets, and how children are particularly vulnerable to hazards from these gadgets.
All too often, it's no accident that accidents happen. They're almost inevitable, the result of distorted priorities. Something to think about: Every town and city in the country, down to the poorest municipalities, has at least one large cockfighting arena, but many have no safe playgrounds, no daycare centers, no sports centers for our young.