EU to Receive Child Safety Report Cards

The European Child Safety Alliance is set to unveil its 2012 Child Safety Report Cards on June 12. The report cards will be issued to more than 30 European countries, and will score how well each handles child safety issues domestically.

Each card will divided into three broad areas. First, it will describe the quality of children’s safety measures in the country. Second, it will highlight gaps in the country’s policies concerning unintentional injury. Third, it will provide the country with good practices that the Child Safety Alliance believes should be adopted.

The specific categories addressed will be passenger safety, motor scooter and moped safety, pedestrian safety, cycling safety, water safety and drowning prevention, fall prevention, burn prevention, poisoning prevention, and choking and strangulation prevention. In addition, the report cards will address each country’s child safety efforts in the categories of leadership, infrastructure, and capacity.

This year marks the third round of the Child Safety Report Card initiative. This year, four new countries will participate in the program. Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania will get their first report card this year. Fifteen others will receive their second, and 14 will get their third. The more years that a country participates in the program, the better the Child Safety Alliance is able to assess progress.

The report cards will be unveiled at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, with support of the Chair of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee Malcolm Harbour, and the European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy John Dalli.

In addition to individual report cards, the group also releases a summary report card that provides a multi-country overview in order to help European-level planning of child-safety issues. The report cards are part of the EU funded TACTICS program, which is a multi-year initiative which supports the adoption and implementation of evidence-based best practices for youth injury prevention in Europe. The TACTICS program is led by the European Child Safety Alliance, and works in partnership with a group of academic institutions and NGOs.