Abstract

A farmers child live, work and play at the farm. The farm is full of exciting and stimulating places but there are also situations and areas that are dangerous. This makes the lives of the countryside children different from the life of other children. This paper is about "Childsafety on farms". It is difficult to judge whether historically there has been an increase or decrease of childrelated accidents in agriculture. The subject is poorly investigated. The development in agriculture has in many ways improved the working-environment for both adults and children. The increased mecanisation and the stressed timetable of today are although factors that seems to have a negative effect for the safety of the children, as shown in this paper. As there are less people on farms than before there are neither time or people enough to take care of the children in a proper way all year around. From literaturestudies the conclusions are that most of the childaccidents at farms are related to: - Falling. - Animals. - Machinery. This is general for Sweden, western Europe and north America. In Sweden the work of underaged people are regulated in special laws for the working life. The law does not include the farmers children although, but a change is probably coming to include these children in the law. There are different theories of how to change a behaviour. The theories in this paper are based on the work made by psychologist H. Leymann. Information about risks are a good way to change riskfull behaviour but to make a change of behaviour easier the information must be accompanied with examples of practical measures. An investigation about the safety of children at farms was made among the officials working at the agricultural public health. The purpose of the investigation was to collect the experienses of these officials concerning the subject. One of the questions asked was how they think that the work for childsafety at farms should be done in the future. A general answer to this was increased information about the risks and how to eliminate these risks. One chapter in this work describes how the work for childsafety at farms is done today. The following chapter describes a plan for a studycourse in childsafety at farms. The purpose of the course is to teach how to make the farm safer for children and how to give first aid to a child who has had an accident. Finally this paper includes a discussion where the authors personal views is presented.

Keywords

barnsäkerhet; barnolyckor; lantbrukssäkerhet; lantbruksolyckor; lantbruk

Published in

Rapport - Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, Institutionen för lantbruksteknik
1990,
Publisher: Institutionen för lantbruksteknik, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/125616