Child Drowning

To prevent it from being overly long, this Working Paper focuses only on drowning deaths (as opposed
to non-fatal drowning). A great deal of data on morbidity was also collected in the individual surveys
and would be a necessary consideration in the design of intervention programmes; this data can be
accessed in previous country-specific publications.
Headlines do not reflect true incidence
If a review of purely media-reported drowning incidents were undertaken, it would erroneously appear
that natural disasters such as tsunamis and flooding or boat/ferry sinking were the primary causes of
drowning deaths in Asian LMICs. Where natural disasters do have a significant regional impact with
implications for increasing the rate of drowning, they tend to be rare events such as the Indian Ocean
tsunami of 2004. While they result in the death of many tens of thousands of children drowning, as was
the case in Aceh, Indonesia, a disaster of this magnitude is rare, usually occurring less than once in 20
years. Drowning from other causes is responsible for most drowning deaths in any given year.
More recently, the devastating monsoon floods across Southeast Asia from June–November 2011
provide a similar example. While the regional total was almost 1,500 deaths, with a large proportion of
them children, the surveys show that many times this number drown every year in each of the
countries affected by the flooding.
The incorrect impression that natural disasters cause most drowning is directly related to how such
occurrences are picked up by the media. Journalists rarely hear about individual drowning deaths; yet
when a boat sinks or a large area floods, a full-scale rescue and recovery operation is mounted, which
draws press attention. These events tend to be drawn out over time, so the media has time to reach
the site before the action is over; whereas in an individual drowning case the event is over within
minutes. The death of a child in a drowning incident is tragic for the family and their community, but
there are rarely political or broader social implications that would be considered by journalists as
newsworthy and it goes uncovered.
Economic conditions pose risk
The surveys show a potential causal link between poverty and drowning. Children in LMICs tend to
drown in the water bodies that are ubiquitous in their daily environment. Key risk factors identified
included: a lack of access to piped water, which necessitates having wells or other water bodies near
the home; large family sizes with supervision of younger children falling to older siblings rather than
adults; lack of access to pre-school education in poorer LMICs (pre-school supervision had a direct
correlation with lowered drowning rates in countries like Viet Nam); and a higher proportion of the
population living in rural areas and therefore at greater exposure rates to water bodies. On average, for
almost 9 out of 10 children in rural areas, a hazardous water body lay within 20 metres of their home.
In the case of China, economic migration resulted in parenting duties falling to grandparents whose age
and failing health made direct and active supervision of very young children difficult. As a result, these
children left behind by their parents had almost triple the drowning rates compared to children living
with their parents.
10