Belgium - Baby "forgotten" in car all day dies

Summer has arrived in Europe and with it once again another of what seems to be an all-too-often reported and at the same time incomprehensible tragedy - that of a baby left in a car all day.

On Monday police in the Belgian town of Louvain confirmed that an 11-month-old girl died last week of dehydration after her father had left her in the back seat of his vehicle while he was at work.

He reportedly forgot beforehand to drop his daughter Britt off at the crèche, and she remained in the car all day - with the outside temperature at around 21 degrees.

Her body was discovered later by her mother when, as was her habit, she went to take the baby seat from the husband's car before driving to the crèche to collect her daughter.

Reading or hearing reports of animals left in cars is surely bad enough. Ignorance perhaps could be an explanation as to why owners often mistakenly assume that a few moments spent away from the vehicle won't do any harm.

However as any animal lover will surely know, and even those who don't own a pet would probably realise, the temperature inside a vehicle can rise quickly, even when it's not high summer. And the outcome is inevitable.

But when it comes to "forgetting a child" it's perhaps harder to understand what's going through - or better put, not going through - the parent's mind.

Last summer in France within the space of a month three separate cases made the national headlines (you can read more details here).

Two of them mirrored last week's Belgian tragedy; professional fathers leaving their children alone in the car after being "distracted" or "forgetting".

In the third, that of a mother leaving her two-and-a-half-year-old girl in the back seat while she did some last-minute shopping, the actions of passers-by avoided the repetition of another family tragedy.

At the time those incidents gave rise to plenty of debate as to why or how they could have occurred.

Burn out, a moment of absence and the pressures of modern life seemed to be at least to be part of the explanation offered up by experts who said that such incidents were more frequent than might at first be imagined.

"For sure these are not isolated cases, but usually they don't end in such a dramatic way," the child psychiatrist Sylvie Angel said in an interview in the weekly news magazine L'Express after the death of two-and-a-half-year-old Yannis in July last year and just a week later that of three-year-old Zoé.

A view backed up at the time by Jean-Michel Muller, president of the Association of Paediatricians of Nice Côte d'Azur, who said that it could happen to anyone.

"If you ask those to whom this has happened, they know that children shouldn't be left alone in the car, but at that particular moment their minds are elsewhere, they have some other problem," he said.

That "moment of absence" was also how Eric Allarousse accounted for having left his son, Yannis, in the car when he appeared in court last December to face charges of involuntary homicide.

It was a trial, which in itself demonstrated a difference in approach between France and Belgium to what is undoubtedly in all cases a family tragedy.

In France both fathers were initially charged with involuntary homicide, with the case of Allarousse going to trial because the public prosecutor wanted to " make public opinion more aware of the dangers and prevent similar incidents happening."

In Belgium though, the justice system seems to be showing a little more compassion for the family with Louvain's assistant prosecutor, Philippe Fontaine, saying no charges would be made.

"This isn't a case of a child being mistreated, but one of a regrettable accident," he said.

Let's hope it's the last such accident to occur here, in Belgium or in any other country for that matter.