The Chinese government is now being urged by legal and traffic experts to regulate the compensation given to those who suffer mental stress from traffic accidents. Once this is achieved experts say that accident victims will be better protected and this will provide judges with some guidance to help avoid unnecessary disputes.
The victims of accidents are increasingly asking for compensation for the mental stress that they go through. Such payouts are made only with a few guidelines and tend to vary from place to place. Traffic authorities in China said that in the year 2011,around 62,387 people were killed in more than 210,000 road accidents in the country.
In the year 2012, out of a total of 162 traffic accident cases heard in China, between the months of January and October in the Shangdong province, about 131 were related to compensation for mental anguish. A man from the Hebei province whose son’s leg was fractured when he was hit by a car in the month of July, was among those whose cases were being heard. The man has asked for compensation and said that he is worried that his 4-year-old son’s injury will affect him for the rest of his life.
The 37-year-old man named Zhang said that his son might have been traumatized by the accident, so he thinks that he deserves to be compensated.
