I was looking ay a table and I see that children were less likely to survive than women in first and third class, although 100% of children in second class survived. Overall half of children survived, compared to a fifth of men, three quarters of women or almost a third of the total number of people onboard.
Now, partly it’s obviously because children were disproportionately likely to be third-class, as the table shows, and only one child from the top two classes failed to survive. However it’s also true that third class children were less likely to survive than third class women.
So, how come? Are children that much of a hindrance on a ship wreck scenario?
Do we know how many of the third class children were siblings? Did all related kids make it off?
I ask because I’m wondering if it wasn’t mere logistics: Mom can only hold on to so many little bodies, and if people are pushing and shoving and jostling and the crowd is surging, some kids probably got separated from their mothers, who made it to the lifeboats with a sibling or two, but not the whole family. Meanwhile, the children left behind get scared and run and hide, so don’t get put on another lifeboat by some other adult.
Not to mention locking the doors from 3rd class to the lifeboat deck.
When the 3rd class men started breaking down the door, the stewrd reminded them that they were damaging company property.
I suspect that part of it is children simply succumbing more easily to hypothermia, but I guess this would only be a factor if some were rescued by a lifeboat after they had spent some time in the water (but then died anyway). I’d imagine there were perhaps a handful in that situation.
I wonder what the age cutoff was for children on that table. A 16 year old male may have been a child for ticketing purposes, but treated as an adult male for “women & children first” purposes.
Well, second class men had the lowest chance of survival at about eight per cent. Second class children all survived, every last one. All twenty five. Of the Eighty in third class, less than a third survived.
