Right: Parents walking their children to school. Some laws on child neglect could lead to the arrest of parents who allow their children to leave the house unsupervised.
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Arguments in favour of harsher penalties for parents who leave their children unattended
1. Significant numbers of young children have been left in cars, sometimes with fatal results
On a hot day, the temperature inside a parked car can be as much as 30øC hotter than it is outside. Even on a day in the mid-20s, the temperature inside a car can soar to dangerous levels within 15 minutes. Young children are more sensitive to heat than adults; their body temperature can rise 3-5 times faster- this means that they have an increased risk of dehydration and heatstroke, as well as more serious outcomes.
Ambulance Victoria responds to around 1,000 incidents each year, with a third of them resulting in a child being taken to hospital.
Since the start of 2014, there have been more than 900 cases of children locked in cars, with almost a quarter of them occurring at home. Melbourne accounted for 87 per cent of cases, with only two calls in Golden Square and 15 in Greater Bendigo. During the heatwave that occurred during the third week of January 2014, Ambulance Victoria attended to 50 cases of children having been left in hot, locked cars.
In the United States, on average, 38 children die each year from heat-related causes after being trapped inside motor vehicles. Between 1991-2011 vehicular heatstroke deaths among children in the United State totalled at least 613. The worst year was 2010 when there were 49 deaths.
2. No consistent charges are levelled against parents whose unattended children die in cars
There is a wide range of charges applied to parents whose children die as a result of being left in cars. Generally charges of manslaughter are not levelled because the charge is seen as too extreme by the prosecution or because it is felt that there would be no conviction for such a charge. Since 1992, two people in Victoria have been convicted of manslaughter for leaving children in cars. It is more common for no charges to be levelled. This situation raises concerns on several fronts.
Firstly, where no charge has been levelled and no penalty applied, there are those who believe that Victoria is failing to use the educative force of the law. Charging, prosecuting and penalising those who commit inappropriate acts is one way of demonstrating to all members of the community that such acts are seriously condemned and must stop. Referring to Victoria's new increased penalties for leaving children unattended, Wendy Lovell, the Minister for Children and Early Childhood, has stated, 'The Napthine Government is taking decisive action and sending a clear message to parents that it is never okay to leave a child unattended in a car.'
Secondly, there is concern that the current situation allows for cases to be treated inconsistently. A recent example is a Bendigo mother who was charged and unsuccessfully prosecuted for manslaughter after her child died in a car parked in her driveway. The mother mistakenly believed that she had left the child asleep in bed when she went on a short shopping trip. The case has been compared to that of a Perth father who, in 2013, forgot to drop his child off at day care only to have his son die in the car park of the father's work in an overheated vehicle. In the Perth case no charges were laid. Critics consider such contrasting treatments inconsistent.
Similar inconsistencies have been noted in the United States. Charges are more likely to be laid in the US; however, even here there are obvious inconsistencies. An analysis by one child advocacy group found that of nearly 500 heat-related child fatalities in cars dating from 1968 to 2013, about 60 percent involved a parent or caretaker getting charged. Another 30 percent of cases had no charges filed, while in the remaining 10 percent, it was unclear what happened.
Some believe a harsher penalty for leaving a child unattended in a car might lead to a more consistent approach and hopefully reduce the need to for authorities to have to deal with parents whose children have died in over-heated cars.
3. Time-poor parents need additional incentive to care for their children
It has been claimed that with the prevalence of families in which both parents work, with the reduction of contact with grandparents and with the growth of single parent families, it has become more difficult to give children extended parental care. Harried, over-worked, under-supported parents are likely to find it more difficult to give their children sustained attention.
Women now represent nearly half of the Australian labour force. Much of this increase in female workplace involvement has been driven by an increase in the workforce participation of mothers. In 2001, over 72% of Australian mothers with dependent children worked for pay, compared to 46% of mothers in the 1980's. Even mothers with very young children show a similar trend.
In 2000, 45% of Australian women with children under four were in the paid workforce compared to 29% in 1985. For families, the combined work times of both parents reveals how much time use has changed. Three decades ago, most couple families in the United States had mothers at home and in these households the time devoted to paid work (by fathers) averaged 45 hours per week. In Australia the combined workload in dual-income families is close to 70 hours per week.
Time-poor parents do not always adequately supervise their children. Between January 2010 and December 2012, in Victoria alone, 76 people were sentenced for leaving children unattended.
Daryl Higgins, deputy director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, has stated, 'Cost of living pressures, the changing nature of work and work availability, the location of work - all these kinds of factors go into disrupting what otherwise might be a sense of communal responsibility for the upbringing and the safety of children.'
It has been claimed that in pressurised family circumstances such as those common today, there may need to be additional legal penalties applied to help to ensure that parents fulfil their guardianship obligations toward their children.
4. More needs to be done to protect children after school and to regulate their behaviour
It appears that children left to their own devices after school are a wide-spread phenomenon in Australia and that the trend is both hazardous and generally disliked by the children concerned.
Surveys in Australia have found between 10 and 14 per cent of school-age children come home to an empty house. It has also been found that some 60 per cent of children aged 10 and under say they disliked being left at home alone, according to a survey conducted by the Kids Help Line, a national telephone counselling service. The survey of Australian home-alone children over two months in 1995, found a further quarter of those older than 13 felt negative about the situation.
Those aged 12 and younger said they felt scared of the dark, storms or being kidnapped when at home without an adult. More than half the children surveyed were alone every day for between one and three hours. More than 30 per cent were responsible for younger siblings. Alarmingly, more than 70 per cent were unsure of what to do in an emergency, such as a fire, accident or an intruder, other than call parents or 000.
Some social critics and experts in child development have noted that the cognitive under-development of children means that it is generally inappropriate to leave them unattended.
Melbourne adolescent psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, has observed that the human brain is not fully formed until age 23. Puberty may be hitting earlier than in the past but cognitive capacity is still undeveloped at earlier ages. This has led many to conclude that it is clearly inappropriate to leave children as young as 12 in complete charge of a house in their parents' absence.
There is also concern that negligent parental behaviour is contributing to violence among young people.
A survey was conducted in 2010 among 842 young people from Chicago neighbourhoods. The participants were first interviewed when they were between the ages of 8 and 13 and again in series of follow-up sessions over an eight-year period.
Levels of violence differed according to the types of neighbourhoods the participants lived in, but higher levels of violence tended to occur in neighbourhoods that often had unsupervised groups of teens. This included 'good' neighbourhoods where residents trust and help each other and watch each other's children, the researchers found.
Studies such as these have been used as evidence that parents need to be given additional incentive, including legal penalties, to ensure they adequately supervise their children.
5. The new penalties will be applied on a case by case basis
It has been claimed that the new penalties will not be applied unreasonably, without adequate consideration of individual circumstances.
A spokeswoman for the Minister for Children and Childhood Development, Wendy Lovell, has stated that the offence of leaving a child without adequate supervision for an unreasonable amount of time, without making reasonable provisions for the child' is determined on a 'case by case basis and subject to individual circumstances'.
The same spokesperson also stated, 'Parents need to use their judgement, if a child is 12 or 13 and is mature enough to be left with younger brothers or sisters - and it was short term - that would be OK, but it wouldn't be OK if that child had an intellectual disability for instance.'
In the Victorian parliament, Ms Lovell further stated, 'There is actually no set age at which it is legal to leave a child unattended - it depends on the child and their situation.
Deciding on whether to charge a parent with this offence is a case-by-case matter. It is about what is reasonable in the circumstances of the particular child. Babies and young children should never be left at home alone, in a car alone, at a supermarket alone or anywhere alone.
As children get older they need the opportunity to gradually take on more responsibility for themselves and practise being by themselves at home. A parent is in the best position to decide whether their child is sufficiently mature to be left alone for any length of time.'