At least 239 children died across Turkey during June, July and August in incidents that the FİSA Child Rights Center classified as preventable, with traffic crashes, workplace deaths and drownings accounting for many of the cases, according to a new report.
Traffic crashes accounted for 57 deaths, the largest single category in the report, while 44 children died in work-related incidents and 46 died in incidents in urban and rural outdoor areas, 44 of them by drowning.
The FİSA Child Rights Center, a civil society initiative operating under the Fikir ve Sanat Atölyesi association, compiled the figures by monitoring local and national online news outlets, daily bulletins from the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV) Documentation Center and data from the Health and Safety Labor Watch (İSİG), which monitors workplace deaths.
FİSA defines children as individuals under the age of 18, in line with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The center said the figures represented a minimum because they were drawn from limited publicly available sources and cautioned that information in its monitoring remained an allegation until verified through further research, new information or court decisions.
Of the 44 deaths connected to workplaces, 36 involved children who were working and eight involved children who were not employed at the workplace but died in incidents that FİSA said occurred because adequate safety measures had not been taken.
Among the 36 working children were three vocational high school students, two trainees in Turkey’s Vocational Education Center (MESEM) system and five seasonal agricultural workers. At least four of the child workers who died were refugees, according to the report.
The 46 deaths recorded in urban and rural outdoor areas included 44 drownings in dams, rivers, ponds, unsecured bodies of water and irrigation canals, many of them canals operated by the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ), the government agency responsible for major water infrastructure.
Another 28 children died in incidents classified as involving physical safety in the home or household accidents, including 20 who died after falling from heights, particularly from open windows and balconies. Separate categories included six deaths from electrocution or contact with high-voltage electricity, four in fires, one from poisoning and 10 attributed by the center to other forms of negligence.
FİSA also recorded eight deaths resulting from violence, including five it classified as peer violence, two as killings of children and one as gender-based violence. The report separately recorded five deaths by suicide, four involving privately owned firearms and 11 that remained classified as suspicious deaths.
The center divided all 239 deaths according to its assessment of the state’s responsibility. It classified 14 as involving incidents at public institutions or actions or omissions by public officials and attributed the remaining 225 to failures by the state to meet what the group described as its obligation to prevent violations of children’s right to life through regulation, oversight and other safeguards.
The characterization represents FİSA’s assessment of the cases and not a judicial finding of state responsibility. The center said five of the 14 deaths in the first category occurred while children were receiving health care, four during sports or cultural activities, three while receiving local government services and two during border crossings.
The report recorded deaths in 63 of Turkey’s 81 provinces. Şanlıurfa had the highest number, with 18, followed by Gaziantep with 12 and Diyarbakır with 10. Of the children whose deaths were recorded, 174 were boys and 60 were girls, while the center was unable to obtain identifying information for five.
At least 19 of those who died were migrant or refugee children, according to the monitoring. They included four child workers, three children killed in traffic crashes, three who died in incidents involving safety in the home and two who died during border crossings.
