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Insight: Apr 24

Insight hears from people who are living with the trauma that they accidentally ended someone's life.

This week’s Insight episode will surely be a difficult watch, as it hears from people who are living with the trauma that they accidentally ended someone’s life.

But some are bravely taking steps towards prevention.

They’re experiences that usually live in the darkest parts of our imagination – a bump reversing into the family garage; a person on the train tracks; a small child darting out in front of a car; civilians killed, not the enemy.

For this week’s Insight guests, however, it’s a difficult reality. How do you deal with unintentionally ending someone’s life?

Peter and Emma Cockburn lost their 15 month-old daughter, Georgina, in a driveway accident in April 2011.

“I felt a bump and instantly realised it didn’t feel right”, Peter says. “So I ran behind the car and I saw my little girl laying on the ground and my worst nightmares [had] come true; I’d run over my little girl … My life just changed in that moment.”

Putting aside the horror of what had happened, the couple made a pact on the night of the accident to share the blame and responsibility, in the hope of giving their three other daughters as normal a life as possible.

It’s been a tough road too for Mick White, a train driver from Western Sydney. In his 30 year career, he’s experienced three fatalities and over 20 near-misses. The eye contact stays with him, as does the feeling of the body going under the train. For many years after his last fatality, he couldn’t drive a car, feeling all the bumps in the road, and he was eventually treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ben Morris has also dealt with PTSD. In 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War, he was the commander of a platoon that lay in ambush one morning outside the Australian Task Force base, at Nui Dat.

They mistakenly opened fire on a group of civilians.

Within seconds, hearing the cries of women and children, Ben realised their mistake.

“I was saying ‘cease fire, cease fire, cease fire’”, he says. “And as I ran forward I was hoping that someone would shoot me in the back so that I didn’t have to face the mess that I knew I was about to face.”

Maryann Gray’s story is one closer to home for every driver: when she was 22, a small boy darted out in front of her car. There was no way to avoid collision. She remembers being horrified by the violence she had inadvertently caused, and felt the need for punishment, despite knowing it wasn’t her fault.

“Once these accidents occur, that trust in the world and often our trust in ourselves is shattered,” she says.

Many years later, she began to open up about her experience, and quickly discovered she was not alone in having accidentally killed someone. To provide support and reduce stigma around accidental deaths, she’s since started a website, http://accidentalimpacts.org/, with relevant resources and information; a process she has found personally rewarding, knowing she is helping others.

“I could let the accident kind of destroy me … or I could choose to grow and get stronger as a result”, she says. “It took me a long time before I was able to do that, but I did.”

If the stories on this program raise any issues for you, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

8:30pm Tuesday on SBS.

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