Basic Facts - Children

Children

The Basic Fact Sheet Children provides accident data for 14 EU countries (EU-15 without Germany) over the period 1996-2005. The fact sheet includes several basic characteristics of fatal road accidents involving children (people younger than 16 years). For example: age and gender, type of road, mode of transport, day of the week and time of the day or the seasonality.

Children are at a greater risk than the overall population and their fatality rate is higher than the overall fatality rate. However, less than one in twenty fatalities in road traffic accidents is a child.

Fact: About 1.200 children died in road traffic accidents in 2005 (EU-14 plus Estonia, Hungary, Malta and Poland) (see Figure 1).

Fact: Children are, on average, at less than a quarter of the risk of dying in a road traffic accident than the average person.

Figure 1: The number of child fatalities in the EU-14, 1996-2005