Reply #41: Actually, women are 25% MORE likely to be jailed for this than men. [View All]

From the KidsAndCars website...



Since the mid-1990s, the number of children who died of heat exhaustion while trapped inside vehicles has risen
dramatically, totaling around 340 in the past 10 years. Ironically, one reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect
their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 — they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily
forgotten.

An Associated Press analysis of more than 310 fatal incidents in the past 10 years found that prosecutions and penalties
vary widely, depending in many cases on where the death occurred and who left the child to die — parent or caregiver,
mother or father:

_Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers. While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the
same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time. And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms
received by dads.


_Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted. But they are jailed
less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time.

_Charges are filed in half of all cases — even when a child was left unintentionally.

A relatively small number of cases — about 7 percent — involved drugs or alcohol. In a few instances, the responsible
parties had a history of abusing or neglecting children. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.



"But no one thinks it's going to happen to them," says Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Cars, a nonprofit
group that tracks child deaths and injuries in and around automobiles.

The AP's analysis was based largely on a database of
fatal hyperthermia cases compiled by Fennell's organization.