The chair of the UK’s Black Swimming Association (BSA) has said greater awareness of water safety is urgently needed in minority communities to save lives.
After recent data showed that children in England from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities were 3.5 times more likely to drown than their white counterparts, the BSA organised a roundtable discussion on the issue at 10 Downing Street with concerned groups this week.
The attenders included a special adviser from the prime minister’s office, representatives of the National Water Safety Forum, the Royal Life Saving Society UK, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the Foreign Office and the World Health Organization, as well as high commissioners from Jamaica, Bangladesh, Ireland and Nigeria.
They discussed a BSA report, OurSwimStory, looking at contributing factors and the experiences of and barriers to aquatic activity in minority communities.
Danielle Obe, the BSA chair, said many people from these backgrounds were “unaware of simple water safety knowledge that could save a life”.
The BSA uses a scale from -3, meaning no water safety knowledge, to +2, where someone pursues a wide range of aquatic activities. Swimming lessons often begin at +1, Obe said, where pupils are assumed to be aware of water safety, not afraid of the water and aware of aquatic opportunities.
She said the roundtable at Downing Street “was really about getting the key stakeholders around the table to recognise that knowledge that communities were starting from -3 and not necessarily from the +1”.
Obe called for a multi-sectoral approach to increasing awareness and confidence. “This is not about pointing the finger as to who should carry the most burden of care. It’s society as a whole. There’s a part the government has to play, there’s a part that national bodies have to play, there’s a part that BSA has to play, there’s a part that you have to play,” she said.
Surveys and interviews were carried out with a total of 1,400 people from black, Asian and other ethnically under-represented communities for the BSA report, which the organisation described as the first of its kind.
The survey found that 48% of respondents did not know how to stay safe in the water, 44% had a fear of water and 34% said they or someone in their family had experienced a traumatic aquatic event.
The report said people often spoke about negative early childhood experiences with water. “People would say ‘I was thrown into the water’ or ‘I thought I was going to drown, and that’s why I didn’t swim as a young child’. Those early experiences shape and form people’s views of aquatics as a whole,” Obe said.
Concerns were also raised regarding privacy, modesty and body consciousness, particularly among older and Muslim participants, while some black and Asian participants worried about the costs of buying swimwear, body and hair care products that suited their needs.
Overall, there were 84 drownings of children and young people in England between 2019 and 2022, the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) team at the University of Bristol said last month. The figure included children under five who drowned in bathtubs.
