Does the Ecuador tragedy mean we need to better protect our children?

By Shahid Naqvi on Apr 21, 08 04:27 PM in Education

One can only imagine what the parents of those poor young women killed on a gap year trip to Ecuador are going through.
Their children were cut down in their prime, a lifetime of possibilities ahead of them. Today the inquest into the death of one of them - 19-year-old Elizabeth Pincock - started and Inevitably the thought will have crossed her parents' mind 'were we right to have let her go'.
The answer is yes. what has been interesting about the aftermath of this tragedy has been the relative lack of people coming forward to criticise school trips.
Admittedly, this was not a school trip, but an organised expedition run by Warwickshire-based company VentureCo which specialises in gap year students.

And Elizabeth was a fully-grown adult, able to make her own decisions in life. Nevertheless, whenever accidents happen we inevitably ask the question 'what could we have done to prevent it'.
Which no doubt will form a major part of the inquest.
While it is right that the cause of the accident is established and any lessons learned, it won't bring Elizabeth or her friends back.
What most people have accepted, I think, is that this was a accident that tragically claimed the lives of these young women while making the most of their lives.
Sure, they could have stayed at home and got a job in an office during their year off. But they wanted to experience more of life. They wanted to expand their horizons and find out more about themselves in the process.
They probably wanted to taste a bit of life on the wild side and away from the safety-obssessed, cotton-whool wrapped Western world.
Interestingly, this has happened in little more than a generation, or so it seems. Most people my age will remember running around freely when they were kids and getting up to all sorts of mischief with their mates.
Strange then that now we are parents we don't afford our own children the same freedom and trust. We feel guilty if we let them on a bike without a crash helmet on.
Why this is so? Maybe it's got something to do with the mass media where stories such as the abduction of Madeleine McCann are played over and over again in minute detail.
Maybe it's the claim culture imported from America. Either way, somehow we changed. And perhaps we're now changing back a bit.
No one has said the women who's lives ended so abruptly shouldn't have gone on the trip. The company behind the exhibition has not - yet - been criticised as irresponsible.
I remember when I was in my early 20s - a grown man for heaven's sake - my father tried to persuade me not to go travelling for six months in India.
A native of that country, he'd probably got so wrapped up in the trappings of Western culture that he thought I'd be in danger. Or maybe he just thought I was too daft to cope on my own.
As it turned out it was one of the best things I ever did.
My son, who's ten, isn't allowed out to roam free like I was at his age. I say it's because we live in a city where there's more traffic than the market town where I grew up in. But I wonder if we'd let him loose even then.
On the other hand, he's fallen off a skateboard at a skateboard centre and knocked out his front adult tooth. And that was in a supervised skateboard park with a parent present.
I wish he hadn't lost his tooth and sometimes wonder if I could have done something different to have prevented it. Even if maybe we shouldn't have let him go skateboarding.
But the alternative is spending all his life indoors experiencing the world through a TV screen. And that - as we are increasingly being told - comes with its own health risks.

Comments (5)

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5 Comments

SassyB said:

There is absolutely NO proof that Madeleine was abducted. All we know is that she disappeared.

April 21, 2008 11:13 PM

Sid Langley said:

My grandchild went back to school yesterday boasting about the new back garden trampoline she had for her birthday only to find a classmate hobbling along having broken his heel on his. We just thought what a convenient reinforcement of all the safety warnings we've been giving. As Forrest Gump didn't quite say, shit happens, or as Tony Soprano does says, waddyagonndu?

April 22, 2008 6:46 AM

shahid naqvi said:

On the thorny subject of trampolines, my son got one for his tenth birthday recently. He fell off and hurt himself within a week but not seriously. I was partly to blame as I was also on it at the time in flagrant breach of the safety rules trying to see how high we could get him to bounce.
Trampolines are the current must-have garden accessory for parents who are too afraid to let their kids out on their own. The irony of it is that they also account for a growing amount of injuries among children.
The big question of course is: to use safety netting or not to use safety netting. Any thoughts?

April 22, 2008 5:34 PM

Sarah Mcgarrigle said:

Madeleine was abducted, they found a seringe in her bedroom on the night she "disappeared" that when fingerprints were tested were from a stranger, no fingerprints from the McCann family. And a mystery string of DNA was found on Maddie's bed, matching none of the McCann family again. Madeleine was snatched from her bed SassyB, they have no proof that Maddie was murdered at all never mind by her parents because they haven't found her body and the McCanns didn't leave any proof behind that "they did it". And if she just wandered off then they would have found her on the night she went missing, they would have found her wandering around. And she might have been abducted while she was wandering round if she did. Someone will have found her if she just walked out, wouldn't they? And besides I read on May 4 that the police accepted that the door and window were way to heavy for a three-year-old to lift or any young child like Madeleine was and still is.

From what I've read and heard, about the blonde woman, the "abductor man" and his "accomplice", I think Madeleine was abducted soley for money because surely a pale-skinned, sunshine-blonde haired, blue/green eyed English toddler would be worth a lot more money than a dark-skinned, dark-haired brown-eyed Spanish girl. I am not being horrible or meaning to be horrible by saying that but that's another thing - remember Ben Needham, he was probably taken by someone who sold him for money to a family who were going to care for him because he was only a one-year-old boy, an English boy who was pale-skinned, blue eyed and sunshine-blonde. I'm afraid that if he was darker skinned or darker hair he wouldn't have been snatched. It's the exact same thing with Maddie, they took her for money, I'm pretty sure of it because she's worth a lot and they can make a lot of money by selling her to the family. Blonde is a symbol of social status in Morocco, and people love blondes in these countries like Spain and Portugal and southern France etc. I believe she's alive and yes, it will take a long time for her to be found, it could take another year, another two years, possibly even three.

But we just have to keep praying, keep believing, keep hoping, and remaining vigilant - and one day, that precious little girl named Maddie will return home. Whenever that maybe - may it be in a couple of years time if God wills - Madeleine McCann will come home eventually. And as the wait for her gets harder and harder day by day, as the heartbreak of her being gone for this long gets worse and worse as the day of the one-year-anniversary gets closer and closer - we have to remain patient. This case into a beautiful little girl will not go on forever - because somewhere, someday and somehow, we will all hear that breakthrough we've all been waiting for for way too long. We aren't the victims, the McCanns are partly the victims but the real victim in this is Madeleine. Whether she is happy right now, whether she is sad - she is still the victim in this abduction and she needs to return home.

April 24, 2008 9:13 PM

Paul Groves said:

Shahid: Go for the safety netting.
If you get it wrapped tightly enough around the base it can act as another type of trampoline.
You can then pin-ball around from side-to-side as well as up and down.
Add a football or a rugby ball for further fun.
A few cans of lager might also help with the thrills and spills.
Extreme trampolining coming to back gardens near you soon, probably.

April 25, 2008 9:06 AM