Why don’t they ever learn

Over 300 children died in accidents in the first three months. Some parents are deliberately putting their children in harm’s way.

Dorairaj Nadason, The Star

There’s an accident at a busy traffic junction. As the tow truck moves in, a traffic policeman directs traffic. A woman on a motorcycle ignores him and rides past. A lorry brushes her and she falls onto a pavement.

She’s fine. But not the three-year-old who was sitting on the bike in front of her.

He hits his head against the pavement and dies on the spot. He was not wearing a helmet.

Another woman fiddles with a phone, supposedly arguing with her husband. Her two children are playing by an escalator. She takes her eyes off them and one just slips over the escalator and falls five floors.

She dies instantly.

Two young lives gone due to carelessness.

I will not point fingers at the parents. God knows they will be blaming themselves and carrying the painful remorse for the rest of their lives.

Parents and caregivers, do need to be careful when children are around. No, more than that.

They have to stop putting the children in harm’s way. Or, as Federal traffic chief Datuk Mohd Fuad Abdul Latif says: “Parents have to stop killing their children on the roads.”

He was talking about those on motorcycles. There just are too many young kids zooming around on motorcycles with a devil-may-care attitude.

The statistics are frightening. Some 310 students have been killed in accidents in just three months of this year – that’s more than 100 a month, more than three a day! Thirteen of them were primary school ­children.

The other statistics are just as worrying. About 85 were critically injured and close to 22,000 summonses were issued to schoolchildren.

Yet, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of others are still carrying on, with nary a care. These are children. They may not know the consequences of their deeds. So, it’s up to the adults. Adults? Think again.

At a school off Old Klang Road in Petaling Jaya, policemen mounted a roadblock.

The objective: To get parents who bring their children to school to wear helmets.

The result: A large number of children stayed away from school that day.

The conclusion: Those parents would rather keep their children out of school than wear helmets when riding motorcycles.

With adults like that, who needs no-good buddies? Which is why I welcome a new move by policemen to go after the parents.

The cops have now decided that if any kid is found riding a motorcycle without a licence, the parent will be hauled up and ordered to pay a RM300 fine, on top of another RM300 fine for the child himself. If you are unable to pay the RM600, the cops will keep the bike.

I hope they slap the parents with GST on the RM600 as well. That should teach them.

And I hope they do it for those who do not wear helmets, too.

The principal of the school says they have repeatedly advised parents to use helmets when sending their children to school, but the advice has gone unheeded.

“They are setting a bad example. It’s a monkey see, monkey do situation,” he says.

The problem, however, is enforcement.

This ruling to penalise parents came into effect on Feb 2. It’s been two months and I don’t see long lines of parents outside police stations trying to bail their children out.

What I see is just as many kids whizzing around on bikes they should not be riding – and still without their helmets.

In many areas, they do it in full view of the policemen, riding past them as they direct traffic. I have seen groups of helmet-less biker kids around a police patrol car.

The policemen are powerless. They are outnumbered or are too busy handling the traffic.

Roadblocks don’t work either, not in places where roads are like warrens, with any number of exits and entry points. Word gets round quickly, and everybody uses a detour.

The cops just need to get proactive and stop the children whenever they spot them, not just during special “operasi” complete with media photographers and all.

Several days after the mother lost her son in the accident, I saw another set of parents zooming down the Pantai Expressway in Petaling Jaya – with two kids on board their bike. Mum and Dad had helmets on.

The kid in front of dad and the one jammed between mum and dad did not.

One little nudge like that lorry and you would have tragedy on your hands.

And this was at almost the same spot where the mother had lost her little one.

They never learn.