Car seat requirement in Korea is short-lived

Jeong Yoo-mi used to hold her infant son in her arms in the back seat on family trips. Now that he is 3, Ms. Jeong, 33, a middle school teacher in Seoul, buckles him up next to her in the back.
“I heard it is good to use a car seat and actually I do have one, but I don’t use it because he behaves well in the car. My friends also don’t use one because it is difficult to set up and the car seat takes a lot of space,” she said.
In Korea, just 12 percent of drivers with children said they used car seats last year, according to a National Police Agency survey. More children in Korea are killed by vehicles ― in traffic accidents or on the street ― than in any other of the 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In 2003, four out of 100,000 children died in traffic accidents in Korea, about four times the rate of Sweden, which had the lowest rate.
Ms. Jeong said she would use her car seat if the government started a crackdown and fined people who didn’t use one.
On June 1, the government did just that. New transportation laws required children under the age of 6 to use a car seat with the seat belt on. Failure to do so meant a fine of 30,000 won ($31), the National Police Agency announced.
Parents complained and the next day, the police agency dropped the plan. Instead, police said, they would promote public awareness of the need for car seats. According to an experiment by the Samsung Traffic Safety Research Institute in 2000, a 6-year-old child who wasn’t using a car seat or a seat belt was injured in the head three times more severely than a child in a car seat.
Still, the government’s car seat requirement enraged many parents.
“I have three children under 6 years and live with a disabled parent. Three car seats would not fit in our car, and should we have to use public transportation not to pay fines?” one posting on the Web site of the police agency read.
Some complained about the additional cost of buying car seats, ranging from 50,000 won ($52.86) to 1 million won here.
“We don’t have to do what foreigners do in their countries. We have our own way to take care of babies,” another posting at the agency’s Web site said.
Kim Young-rok, an official at the agency’s transportation department, said, “When the legislators passed the revision at the National Assembly, we thought it would be too early to start a crackdown. Car seats are relatively expensive, and currently not many people understand why they have to use car seats.”
“It is necessary to first educate people to use car seats like they use seat belts,” Mr. Kim said. He said the agency would postpone the crackdown at least until the end of this year.
“The revision is also contrary to the government’s policy to increase the birthrate since it would be difficult for a family with more than two children to use car seats for all of the kids in terms of space and cost. Thus, the agency recommended that the government lend car seats for free or at a low cost, then work to raise public awareness. We will see how it goes and then decide when to start inspections,” said Park Sung-woo, another official at the department.
Nevertheless, Hong Seung-jun, a researcher at the Samsung institute, said the country’s low car seat usage is one of the reasons South Korea has the highest rate of children under 14 years old killed in traffic accidents among the OECD nations.
In Sweden, more than 90 percent of drivers use car seats. And in the United States, parents are usually not allowed to leave the hospital unless they show proof that the baby will go home in a car seat.
Korea’s “high child traffic fatality can be explained with many different reasons, including insufficient protection for children walking on streets near schools or while they are getting into and out of cars,” Mr. Hong said.
Experts say that younger children are more likely to be killed in cars than on streets. Data from the Safe Kids Korea said among the 216 children under 4 years old killed in traffic accidents in 2001, 97 percent died in cars. In contrast, more than 60 percent of children above the age of 5 were killed on the streets.
For the past several years, the number of children killed in a vehicle or on the street by a vehicle has significantly decreased, from 588 in 2000 to 284 last year, due to increased numbers of school zones and road safety campaigning, according to the Health Ministry’s announcement in May last year.
The sale of car seats has gone up due to the law, retailers say. “Although the crackdown has been deferred, the sales of car seats have constantly increased by 30 to 40 percent,” sadi a sales woman at Baby Plaza, a baby products store in Ilsan, Gyeonggi province.
“During this year’s vacation season,” said an official at Etoyworld, a rental store for baby products, “the number of customers borrowing car seats has increased by 10 percent.”
The Korea Transportation Safety Authority and the Korea Children’s Safety Foundation began accepting applications July 24 from people who want to borrow car seats for free.
They have already received more than 7,000 applications. “We planned to lend about 7,000 car seats and are considering increasing the supply to 10,000 seats if it is possible,” an official at the foundation said.
“Other public organizations, the government and automobile industry, need to provide financial support to parents to reduce the burden on parents to buy car seats,” Lee Hyun-joo, a researcher at the Road Traffic Authority, suggested.
Mr. Hong at the Samsung Traffic Safety Research Institute also claimed, “Parents have to put children in car seats right after they are born so they can get used to sitting on them. It is more important to educate people on the proper ways to use car seats than just to enforce them to have car seats.”

by Kim Soe-jung