IN THE week the police launch a campaign to make sure seatbelts are worn within the car, it is a message one kiosk owner in Paphos wishes more people would heed.

And it is those who travel without their children properly secured that cause the most ire. And, Petros Mavros travel business consultant and owner of El Paso, the first drive through kiosk come cafe in Paphos, is now on a mission to make every parent/guardian who drives a vehicle when children are on board ensure their precious cargo is safely strapped in.

As a way to encourage this life saving habit the El Paso will give away free ice lollies to every child seen to be using a seat belt or child booster seat during the months of July and August.

This Cool Kids Campaign is one that Petros is passionate about. “One woman drove up to the kiosk and I could see immediately as the BMW turned into the drive that she had a boy of about six jumping around in the front seat. In the rear there was a little girl of around three years old, neither child was restrained so I asked her why? Her response was ‘They don’t want to’”.

“I then offered the children a sweet and that’s when the mother put up her hand in protest and said ‘Oh no, please, I don’t like my children having too much sugar’. Well I couldn’t help myself so I told her ‘You worry more about your children getting fat when you should be worrying about keeping them alive when they are in the car’. Needless to say I have lost that woman as a customer, but I really don’t care, I see this kind of thing every day and it’s truly criminal. Just take the relatively large weight of a child’s head if they are thrown forward it would be like a watermelon in a collision.

“One man told me the reason his kids were playing in the back of his double cabin was because ‘We only live down the road so there’s no chance of an accident’ yet statistics show that 29 per cent of collisions occur within 2km of home”.

Petros says it is time the government stopped measuring the success of their policies in kilometres of roads and started thinking about the safety of children and come down hard on those who endanger their innocent lives.

“One answer could be hard hitting TV commercials like the one where a woman driver is killed by her own son because he is not wearing a seat belt in the back”. So successful has been this advertisement that the French road safety minister asked permission to use the campaign after he saw UK government statistics showing how effective it had been.

The video mentioned can be viewed here.