Child deaths fuel calls for guardianship law

Legal action needed to keep parents from leaving kids home alone: experts

Chinese experts have called for the establishment of a law outlining guardians' responsibilities after at least three children died in the past week from falling from high buildings while they were left home alone.

A 3-year-old girl fell from her home on the 15th floor in Beijing's Chaoyang district on Tuesday and was killed instantly. She had been left at home alone by her grandmother, the Beijing Times reported Thursday.

According to the report, the girl's parents were out, and her grandmother - who was taking care of her at the time - went out to buy some food while the girl was taking a nap.

Elsewhere, a 4-year-old boy in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province died in a fall from the 23rd floor on Sunday, and a 4-year-old girl fell from a third-floor window and died on July 15 in Cenxi, Southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Both children were at home alone when they died, local media reported.

The frequency of tragedies that occurred when children were left home alone has sparked outrage among the public, and many experts have said that China should swiftly establish a new law banning parents from leaving their preschool-age children alone at home.

"Leaving children home alone can often cause accidents, such as falls from a high level, fires, electric shocks and choking from swallowing foreign objects," Zhao Hui, director of the Beijing Bar Association Committee on Child Protection, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Young children are unable to recognize and judge danger, while many parents in China lack basic safety knowledge and consciousness of risks to their children's safety, so they are often careless or absentminded about looking after their kids, Zhao said.

"However, there are only a few local regulations advocating that children should not be left at home by themselves," said Monica Cui, executive director of Safe Kids China, an NGO. She added that a national law on the issue should be passed soon.

The municipality of Shanghai's Regulations on the Protection of Minors stipulates that parents or other guardians should look after and protect juveniles and avoid leaving preschool-aged children unsupervised. But Zhao said the law should hold parents responsible if their children are severely hurt due to parents' extreme neglect of their duty.

According to Zhao, some states in the U.S. have ordered that children under a certain age cannot be left home alone, otherwise parents could face criminal charges or even be deprived of the guardianship of their children.

"Society should also provide more public services such as day-care centers at workplaces or in neighborhoods to look after children whose parents are at work," Cui added.

Statistics from chinachild.org, a Beijing-based NGO focusing on protecting juveniles, showed that in the 754 cases of accidental injuries to children from 2009 to 2014, 73 were cases of accidental falls.