UAE: How to protect your child from falling off balcony
Abu Dhabi residents have been asked to take safety precautions to ensure that children are not harmed by tragic accidents of them falling from balconies of commercial buildings.
In an education campaign, Abu Dhabi Police said that parents should be vigilant when their children are near windows, furniture sizes or anything that could see them climbing on the wall of the porch and falling off balconies.
The government gave five advices to parents and carers about how not to allow children to become victims of such tragedies. These are:
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Never to leave the kid at home or on the balcony.
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Do not forget to put up a acrylic fence on the balcony (once you have the go ahead from the professional authorities).
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Open the porch door, and never open the balcony unless you need to.
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Always put in good security locks for windows and balcony doors.
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Put no furniture on windows or balconies.
"Parents have a responsibility of preventing children from painful accidents, and the injury can cause death, by parents’ failure or carelessness," the police stressed.
These were the guidelines of the authority, published in an awareness program under the title ‘our winter is safe and fun’.
And previously, governments in multiple emirates in the UAE had advised parents through education campaigns — especially in the winter months — to be prepared with security measures to avert this kind of death.
The accident happens more often during the winter, according to officials, when people open their windows or sit in the balcony to get cool.
In Sharjah, the municipal authority of the city had amended technical standards of windows and balconies from 2017. Now, due to the new rules, the landlords and contractors are increasing the windows and balconies to 120cm instead of 1m. Now they have to install safety locks so that windows cannot open more than five or 10cm. Even the government has ordered them to put up railings that children cannot over.
One four-year-old girl died this March after a tumble from the 20th floor of a Sharjah apartment building.
A 17-year-old boy in 2023 fell from his apartment building in Ajman. In the same year, a 12-year-old girl drowned in Dubai, her mother at work and father abroad in India.
Over 30 children died between 2012 and 2022 after jumping out of windows or balconies, officials have reported.
One of them, a five-year-old girl, died after tumbling from the ninth floor of a Dubai building in Al Qusais district in 2022. A 3-year-old boy of Asian nationality, who had fallen from the 14th floor of a Sharjah building, died another day in Sharjah.
In the same year, a Nepalese guard and tenant pulled a five-year-old boy who was hanging from his tower seeking his mother.
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