Janette Fennell fights for kids and car safety.
“Why are we all backing up blind?” she asks. “Every week, 50 kids are being backed over and two of them are killed. In 70 percent of those cases it’s the parents behind the wheel. You are killing your own kids, because you can not see them!”
She is now a much-quoted child safety advocate, a driving force pushing the auto industry to do more to make kids safe in and around cars. But in 1995 she was just a wife and mother in Marin Co., Calif., who worked in sales management and marketing. Then one night, thieves forced her and her husband into the trunk of their car. They got out alive by tearing up the trunk insulation. The terrifying experience sparked her fight to get the government to require safety latches in trunks. After five years her efforts were successful.
But that wasn’t the end for Fennell. Out of the experience came the non-profit organization “Kids and Cars.” Fennell had discovered during the fight for trunk latches that the government kept no records of injuries or fatalities in non-traffic related auto accidents. Without the numbers it is hard to get legislation.
So Janette began compiling a database, which she mostly collected anecdotally through news accounts. The database tracked the numbers of people, mostly children, who were:
- Trapped in automobile trunks and killed or injured;
- Died when left in hot cars with the windows closed;
- Strangled to death by automatic windows when they accidentally hit the toggle or rocker switch while leaning out the window;
- Injured when they knocked an unattended vehicle into gear;
- And backed over in driveways and parking lots.
Working with other advocacy groups and Consumer Reports, Kids and Cars convinced the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to band toggle and rocker switches on automatic windows and sunroofs. And NHTSA is now developing a method for keeping track of all non-traffic vehicle accidents.
But Fennel doesn’t believe NHTSA needs a database or a congressional mandate to create a standard for what drivers should be able to see when backing up.
“I can already tell them it is a problem,” she says. “What they’re going to find out is that it’s much bigger than I’ve ever noted. It’s probably two to three times the numbers that I’ve been able to uncover.”
What she has uncovered in the last four years is that between 100-150 of the 2,500 children backed over each year are killed. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that between 2001-2003 almost 7,500 children were treated in emergency rooms for injuries caused by backover accidents. But if the injured went to a private doctor or the hospital record did not reflect the cause of the accident, those incidents were not counted. Kids and Cars has the only national database of deaths from backovers, but they only know about accidents that get media attention or that they are told about.
Fennell believes the need is already clear that “backup cameras” or “sensors” should be a must in all vehicles.
“We are seeing more cars where cameras are being added and sensors are being added, but it tends to be the higher-end vehicles,” says Fennell. “And, you know, it shouldn’t just be for people who can afford it. This is a safety feature that everyone needs.”
Besides keeping a database of accidents, Kids and Cars lobbies for legislation and oversees other projects to help educate the public about non-traffic dangers.
“[We are] kind of a small voice here, trying to make people aware of a huge problem,” she says. “We need everybody to get educated about this topic and do something about it.”