The Danger of Helping Elderly People
In this post, but also many others, we read about reports of people who die because passers-by ignore them.
This particular story is about a 2-year-old girl, who was run over by a van and left unaided on the street for more than 5 minutes. The other story I read was about an old man who was discovered dead, about two hours after he fell down in the street. Both were in China, but I’m sure it could happen anywhere.
The thing in China is, it seems that not only people are casually ignoring other people, as we do in so many developed countries, but there are some highly publicized court cases where elderly people sue their “saviors”, and the saviors are actually sentenced to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan.
So people are now wary of helping elderly who happen to fall in front of them.
So the Chinese Ministry of Health has issued guidelines for “helping elderly people who have fallen down”, it seems.
It had to come to that.
EDIT [2011/10/19]: I have to add that this kind of behaviour is, of course, not limited to China. It just so happens that recent events have happened there and have been publicized. But stupid trials and “passerby syndrome” are not unheard of in various parts of the globe.
