Facing facts in the child safety debate

Australia has opened the way for children to be safeguarded by rear-facing safety capsules up to the age of four.

It's an initiative welcomed by Volvo's subject matter expert, Dr Lotta Jakobsson (pictured), who has been in Australia raising awareness of child safety issues. Dr Jakobsson is a strong proponent of this new regime for keeping kids safe in cars. But there's a problem...

No retailer, wholesaler or manufacturer in Australia currently offers large, rear-facing child safety capsules capable of accommodating children up to the age of four.

Traditionally, in Australia, children up to the age of about six months are transported in rear-facing safety capsules with a top tether to the nearest anchorage point (usually the parcel shelf in a sedan or the back of the seat in a hatchback or wagon). The government encourages parents to keep kids in rear-facing capsules until the age of 12 months, but in practice, parents are just as likely to replace the capsule with a forward-facing seat as soon as the child turns six months and can sit upright.

According to Dr Jakobsson parents should forget about the forward-facing seat and buy a larger capsule instead, especially since this method of transporting kids has now secured the approval of the federal government. But this is one instance where the market has not kept pace with legislation, and there are no capsules for larger kids currently offered to Aussie parents.

"Since it is now possible in Australia to actually use rearward-facing [capsules] up to four [years old], I think it's a shame... but that is not the case," she said.

"10 years back or 20 years back... it wasn't really possible to certify a large, rearward-facing seat, but today it is."

Dr Jakobsson explained also that larger capsules such as she recommends can be purchased in Europe.

The argument in favour of keeping kids in rearward-facing capsules longer is just one element of a rapidly changing child safety context in Australia. After years of leading the world in child safety, according to Dr Jakobsson, Australia is now lagging behind.

"Australia has a very good global track record -- statistically good figures -- in terms of fatalities of children in cars," said Dr Jakobsson.

"Australia was the first country, actually, to have a standard for child safety... to regulate that children should be restrained in cars. I read something about it was even before you had rear-seat seatbelt fitment laws."

That's why it's hard to find Australian statistics concerning child fatalities in cars -- and why they don't reveal that much. The actual numbers are low, not only due to our smaller population, but on a per capita basis and compared with the rest of the world. It's also why government, motoring associations and other lobby groups have resisted the move to the ISOFIX system that has been available in Europe since 1999.

According to Dr Jakobsson, the federal government will introduce an ISOFIX ADR (Australian Design Rule) from 2013, although that date is "probably not realistic" to use her own words.

There's no word yet as to whether the Australian government will adopt the European ISOFIX standard or the US standard. The Euro version of ISOFIX (with some variation from one country to the next within the European Union) demands a rigid base attachment, but doesn't require a top tether. In the US, the ISOFIX seat makes do with a flexible base attachment, but that must be partnered with a top tether.

Ideally, Australia would be best to go with a combination of the two systems: rigid base attachment and a top tether. The American system is not all that far removed from our current standard, mandated under ADR 34/01 -- a system that Dr Jakobsson admits has served us well, but is less forgiving than ISOFIX if it's not fitted correctly.

"I read in the publications from Australia... that [there weren't] that many clear benefits -- at least from a crashworthiness point of view, because if you fit the child's seat with the belt, properly, you will get the same crash performance. That's a fact. I wouldn't say that this [ISOFIX] is a safer attachment, given that you've done the right routine with the seatbelt...

"If you're just looking at crashworthiness in a laboratory, you might end up with the conclusion that [ISOFIX] is not worthwhile."

The problem with the current system, according to Dr Jakobsson, is that the seat is frequently installed incorrectly. There have been cases of parents pulling the seatbelt around the front of the seat, to hold both child and seat in place from the front, allowing the whole seat to submarine under the belt in the event of a crash. And if parents can be so negligent, who's to say they'll even bother fastening the top tether?

Statistics compiled in Australia indicate that up to 70 per cent of child safety seats are not installed correctly, which is an appalling figure by anyone's standards. Unfortunately, who's to say that such negligent parents won't also find novel ways of installing ISOFIX seats incorrectly -- not locked into the base between the backrest and squab cushions, but held in place by a seatbelt wrapped around the seat.

It's Dr Jakobsson's view that the chances of misuse with an ISOFIX seat are much reduced however. She also considers that parents should be better educated on more focused on child safety than seems to be the case currently, and she provided two examples to illustrate the lack of child safety awareness or apathy that informs the debate in Australia.

Parents need to consider, for instance, the physique and size of their child before changing over to a booster seat. Children's hips are relatively narrower than adults' and booster seats should be allow seatbelts to be threaded through and across the occupants hips, taking into account the child's 'pelvic maturity'.

And there seems to be a presumption that child safety is a matter of scaling down safety for adults. It's not. The head of a newborn infant is half the total weight, versus just five per cent of the total weight for an average adult. Adult vertebrae are far more resistant to shearing in the event of an accident, which is why it's so important a child under 12 months be protected from whiplash by occupying a rearward-facing capsule. It's also why Dr Jakobsson recommends rearward-facing capsules for children up to four years of age.

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