Here is a general information article about attempts to address this problem.
It can happen to anyone. This is about a pediartrician who backed over his child and what he is doing about it.
Standard System Sought for Vehicle Backup Safety
Feb. 28--They are a sound and a sight, says the pediatrician, that no parent should have to endure.
He says the thump sounded as if he had backed over the morning paper tossed into the driveway. But it was 9:30 at night and there was no newspaper. He recalls the horrible wash of headlights over pajamas, a clutched blanket, and a crumpled child's body.
The doctor, Greg Gulbransen, whose job is to defend and save young lives, is also a father who accidentally killed his own son. He has told the story again and again in the past 2 1/2 years, of how he lost Cameron, and how needless was the loss, a child backed over by an SUV purchased to keep the family safe on the road.
Gulbransen, of Oyster Bay, N.Y., tells his story at the forefront of what is largely a consumer-driven push to make backup safety equipment standard on cars sold in the United States. He says that while much attention is focused on protecting children who are occupants of motor vehicles -- with child seats, air-bag avoidance, and redesigned power windows -- the federal government keeps no records of children killed in their family driveway by drivers who cannot see their tiny forms behind the rear bumper.
Most drivers do not realize that even a small sedan, such as the Honda Accord, can pose backup problems. Kids and Cars, a child advocacy safety group, offers test results that calculate the average height of a young child either standing or riding a tricycle behind a vehicle to be 28 inches.
They show that, depending on whether the driver is of average height or shorter, the child would have to be 12 to 17 feet behind the Accord before the child could be spotted through the rear window or in the mirror. A Toyota Sequoia SUV would require that the child be 15 to 25 feet back, and the large Chevrolet Avalanche pickup truck requires from 30 to 50 feet of range.
The most effective backup safety equipment, such as sensors or cameras that show what is behind a vehicle, are often standard on only the most expensive vehicles or those equipped with navigation screens that cost thousands of dollars extra.
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And while the trade journal Automotive News reported that a 2002 NHTSA study says that more than 300 young lives were saved that year by child safety seats, a much-publicized safety initiative by Kids and Cars estimates that as many as 300 children are backed over and killed each year.
Thousands more are injured, says Janette E. Fennell, founder and president of the Kansas City-based group.
"Where's the outrage?" asks Sally Greenberg, senior product safety counsel for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and a group that has supplied Kids and Cars with documentation.
Greenberg says that when airbags were linked to child deaths, "the government mobilized, Congress mobilized," and systems often far more complicated than backup systems were added to automobiles to save young lives.
"We didn't really see" a spike in backover deaths "until around 2000 to 2001," says Fennell.
The turn of the millennium is when light trucks, which include SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks, began to outsell passenger cars in the United States. And the higher and longer a vehicle, the harder it can be to see behind it.
Child deaths by backup "spike" at about 1 year of age and stay at their peak until about 23 months, according to Fennell. At that age and older, "They're just learning to walk, to open gates and barriers," she says.
The children often fall victim, according to Fennell, to "bye-bye syndrome."
http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=34150
