Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque :
I wrote a lot about Child Safety drawing the attention of the Government and NGOs. My works touching upon this problem appeared in journals and vEnglish Dailies. Even then I have to prepare a write up as I feel it incumbent upon me to warn the parents or guardians of the children advising them to take care of their safety and security. The government and NGOs and mull steps to protect the children. Much depends on the seriousness of the parents. Mothers should not allow her child to go outside all the time. Accidents may occur if the mother remains callous not noticing where her child is going and where he is moving. Her child, boy or gir,l may go near burning furness or near tank or trekking far to be kidnapped or moving recklessly to be run over by vehicles.
There are plenty of tragic stories about the accidents of the children. There recurring tragedies are attributed to the stoic indifference of the parents. I suggest if any boy or girl at the early stage wants to go to school he or she should be accompanied his or her mother vor father or any reliable family member.
Of late there has been a phenomenal increase in the deaths of the children by accidents like running over by a vehicle, death after being raped, drowning etc.
Very recent tragedies V have been reported by a news paper:
Lamiya, 10, daughter of Harun-or Rashid, Yasmin Khatun, 11, daughter of Sontu Miah, students of Chuadanga Provati School, drowned in the river around 5:00pm while they were taking bath, said Abdus Salam, a deputy-director at Chuadanga Fire Service, reports UNB.On information, divers from the fire service station rushed to the spot and recovered the bodies in the evening,
In fact Drowning has become a major cause of child accident. As has been reported by a newspaper(23rd May 20017):
Two cousins drowned in a pond at Purbo Adharmanik Godarpar village in Raowjan upazila of Chittagong district on March 4. Quoting locals, police said Juboraj Barua, 6, son of Suman Barua drowned in a pond when he was playing with his cousin Deboraj Barua, 07. Deboraj, son of Bhutan Barua, went to save his brother and he drowned too. Later, they were rushed to a local hospital where the attending doctors declared them dead.
Father of the victims Suman and Bhutan are siblings. In another incident, two minor sisters drowned in a pond in Mohammadpur area in the capital in December in 2016. Experts said drowning is one of the leading causes of death of children in Bangladesh. They termed drowning ‘a silent killer’ of children, aged between one year and 18 years in the country.
They said, in Bangladesh, around 18,000 children die every year from drowning. Proper steps should be taken to save lives from now on, they said.
A study shows that more than 18,000 children, mostly 1-4 years of age, die each year from drowning in Bangladesh. “Children in Bangladesh, who cannot swim, are 4.5 times more vulnerable to drowning than those who can swim in this riverine country,” the study revealed.
It said more than 12,500 children die from drowning before they celebrate the fifth birthday, while the rest 5,500 die between the age of 5 and 17 years. According to an independent survey of the UNICEF, creating social awareness, giving training on how to swim and installing bamboo-made fences around the ponds can significantly reduce deaths in drowning. A report in the Health Ministry bulletin says that cases of drowning of children aged 0 to 18 top the chart.
The number of children drowning is far more than the deaths from measles, bronchitis, diphtheria and tuberculosis.
Child health experts said one of the objectives of the MDGs is reducing infant mortality. But the number of drowning is a huge obstacle to attaining that goal. People concerned feel that increased parental awareness, capacity building of parents, effective social and family security and lessons in swimming could bring down the mortality rate. Although these deaths occur throughout the year, their incidence is highest during the monsoon. The chance of such deaths increases with the proximity of water bodies to the household. Children playing in the inflated rivers, canals, ponds, ditches and other water bodies die frequently. Apart from this, a lot of children die where settlements are near the river or ocean. During full and blue moon the waters rise. Many children die then. Besides, children also die during tidal surges, because children are the least capable of coping with those adversities. In the tidal surge of 1970 of the 1.2 million people died, half were children. In the 1991 tidal surge the proportion was the same.
The experts said conducting awareness campaigns, increasing knowledge and efficiency among the parents for looking after their children, ensuring effective family and social security as well as giving training on how to swim could reduce the children’s death risk.
The Guardian reports about hidden tragedies
When water is all around you, how do you keep your children safe? That is the question haunting the village of Mubarakpur in Netrakona district, northern Bangladesh.
On 12 February, Sabuj Mia, a local farmer, came home to find his six-year-old daughter Sumaiya floating face down in the backyard pond. She had slipped while plucking fruit from a jujube (red date) tree that grew close to the water. The little pile of jujubes Sumaiya had picked lay at the foot of the tree. She did not know how to swim. At midday there had been nobody in the house to hear the child’s frantic splashing after she fell into the pond.
As the Mias buried their daughter, their neighbours shared the couple’s grief. Almost every household in Mubarakpur has lost children to drowning in the past few years. Mia’s cousin and nextdoor neighbour Abdus Samad lost his only son Ibrahim, aged 18 months, last year when the toddler walked out of the house and fell into a roadside ditch.
Two houses down, Ishraq Ali and his wife Dilara are still grieving the loss of their daughter Nazma who drowned two years ago at the age of five.
“There are ponds everywhere,” says Sabuj’s wife Sabina Begum. “During the monsoon there is water all around. We have to tend to the cattle or go to work in the fields. But there is always a terrible worry in the back of our minds about the children.”
Mubarakpur is not an isolated case. Bangladesh, a country crisscrossed with rivers and canals, has one of the highest drowning rates in the world. More than 17,000 Bangladeshi children drown every year – nearly 50 a day, according to the Bangladesh health and injury survey, conducted in 2003.
A report by Unicef and the Alliance for Safe Children (Tasc) has found that the cause of death in roughly one in four children who die between one and 10 years of age is drowning. This makes drowning the leading killer of children in Bangladesh, overtaking diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.
“It’s a hidden epidemic,” said Dr Jahangir Hossain, programme co-ordinator for the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB). “Proportionate to population, more children die from drowning in Bangladesh than in any other country. But most of the programmes combating child mortality are focused on infectious diseases. Drowning hardly gets a mention in national policy circles.”
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In the past few years, communities have started to fight back. Several NGOs and civil society organisations have set up swimming programmes for children. The most successful has been the SwimSafe initiative, backed by Unicef. Developed jointly by Tasc and the Royal Life Saving Society Australia, and implemented in Bangladesh by CIPRB and others, SwimSafe employs community-based instructors to teach children how to swim and rescue others.
“It’s like a vaccine for drowning,” says Salem Mia, the co-ordinator for SwimSafe in Netrakona. “People used to scoff at us. They took swimming for granted. But many children nowadays don’t pick up the skills until adolescence and many die an unnecessary death.”
Since its inception in 2006, SwimSafe has trained more than 200,000 children. The Unicef/Tasc study found that drowning death rates for children aged four and older who participated in SwimSafe were reduced by more than 90%. In the past three months, the programme in Netrakona district has selected and trained 96 community swimming instructors (CSIs).
Jhuma Begum, an undergraduate student at a local college, will be paid a nominal amount of Tk100 (80p) per trainee, but she says it is about more than money. “People in the community know me now. And I’m happy I’m doing something for others,” she says.
A group of 15 children glide about in the water using bright-yellow kickboards and practising rescuing each other with long bamboo poles.
“I know how to swim!” exclaims Eva Khatun, aged four, as she emerges dripping from the water and runs to greet her family. “It’s good that the girl has learned [to swim],” says her father, Rafiqul Islam, a local trader. “My wife and I will be less worried now when we leave her at home.”
SwimSafe is one component of a larger child injury prevention project, explains Amy Delneuville, child protection specialist with Unicef in Bangladesh. “Drowning and other injuries usually take place during the day when parents are busy with their work and siblings go to school,” she says.
“Unsupervised children wander off and fall into local water hazards. To prevent this, we are piloting bamboo fencing of ponds, community awareness and village daycare centres that provide supervised care for children.”
The Unicef/Tasc study found that in villages with daycare facilities, death rates from drowning have dropped by 80% among children under four.
Golam Mustafa, joint secretary of the Bangladesh Swimming Federation says SwimSafe should be scaled up to national level. “The government should embrace these interventions and make it part of the country health sector programme,” he says. “We need to do more to teach children a culture of water safety.”
In Mubarakpur, Sabina Begum says she is waiting for the day her surviving daughter, two-year-old Saleha, can start taking swimming lessons. “What happened to me – I don’t want this to happen to any other mother,” she says.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Chittagong University)
