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Injuries to Children on Your Property
By owning property, you are a “landowner,” and by renting land, you become a “possessor.” Landowners and possessors have limited duties to protect others from injury while on their land. Only people they invite onto their land should be reasonably protected from harm.
However, landowners owe a heightened duty of care to children trespassers, who are effectively “invited” onto land through an “attractive nuisance.” Traditionally, the law only required landowners to warn trespassers of artificial dangers such as animal traps (not to fix the danger). However, when children trespassers are likely to be enticed onto the land because of an attractive danger, the landowner is responsible for making the land safe.
There was the sad case of children who were trespassing on land on a hot summer’s day when they noticed a cool, clear pool of water. As they waded into the water, they suddenly died, because the water was poisoned. However, since the children did not see the pool from the property boundaries, the landowner was not responsible for their deaths.
Because of cases like this, the law has changed to embrace cases where the child was not lured onto the property by the danger. There only has to be the likelihood of trespassing children. The landowner must fix those dangers that a child could get hurt by.
However, a landowner is excused if the child was old enough to understand the danger involved, and therefore should have avoided it.
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