Tuesday 21 August 2007

NSPCC

This press release got big coverage on yesterday's BBC news.

Apparently, "On average, between one and two children are killed by their parents or carers every week. This has not reduced for the past thirty years..."

That sounds like a low and stable level of violence to me, out of twelve million or so kids in this country, your chances of dying this way are 0.0075% in the first 15 years of your life. So why come up with a long list of airy-fairy solutions to an impossible problem? "Raising awareness"? What sort of crap is that?

To put it another way, your chances of being murdered by a parent are about one-third of the chance of being killed in a traffic accident (156 deaths in 2005). Seeing as a further 3,500 children are seriously injured, maybe that is something that we should be concentrating on, you can actually do things to reduce this even further.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But is it true? If the number of children living not with Daddy but instead with Mummy's current lover has been steady, and the readiness with which people turn to violence, and the level of treatment of the insane, and the availability of drugs and cheap booze - if these are all steady, then the figure might be plausible. But I doubt it. First test - do they include honour killings? That might be a test of their honesty. As if you need one with the NSPCC.

Mark Wadsworth said...

I have no idea whether the "1 to 2 children per week" figure is true, I am taking it at face value.

BUT - all the factors you mention would make you expect the rate of child murder to have greatly increased, which is exactly the kind of statistic that the NSPCC would like to be able to use.

So I guess the stat's are correct!