New guidance for reporting of road traffic collisions

Every 20 minutes someone is killed or seriously injured on British roads. Much of the reporting around these incidents portrays collisions as unavoidable, obscures the presence of certain actors or omits crucial context as to why crashes happen and what we can do to prevent them.

A new set of guidelines have been produced in consultation with road safety, legal, media and policing organisations and individuals, to supplement professional codes of conduct and support the highest standards of reporting in broadcast, print and online.

Why does it matter?

If you accidentally spill coffee on your trousers, that’s one thing, but if a driver's speeding car slams into a bus stop, killing a child in the process, it’s clearly different...so why does the language we use rarely distinguish between the two? While one can be dismissed as an accident, the other deserves to be described more carefully - nothing less than collision or crash will do.

After all, words are powerful. It's the reason we avoid the term 'road safety', preferring instead 'road danger reduction', which far more accurately defines the challenge at hand.

When collisions occur on the railways, at sea or in the air, there are enquiries to determine their causes. Those responsible for piloting the planes, driving the trains or skippering the ships are suspended from duty pending the outcome and appropriate changes to systems, regulation or the law are implemented swiftly.

It's not altogether clear why the same thing doesn't happen following every road fatality in Britain, but until it does, let's at least be mindful of the way we describe road danger.

When the media use the term ‘accident’, it implies the collision wasn’t preventable. The term ‘crash’ does not imply the driver is always to blame, it simply acknowledges that the matter deserves serious investigation and remedial measures to try and prevent it happening again. It's an approach that has allowed other European countries to introduce a Vision Zero - a serious attempt to prevent all deaths on the road.

According to the new guidelines, journalists should also ascribe agency in their reporting by being clear it’s motorists doing any killing, not their motor vehicles.

Britain is a long way off implementing its own meaningful Vision Zero strategy, but choosing our words carefully when we describe road danger will be a meaningful first step.

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