Rebecca Oaten, aka The Helmet Lady, and her crusade for compulsory bike helmets

Tuesday, 13 March 2018

Rebecca Oaten, aka the Helmet Lady who campaigned to make cycle helmets compulsory in New Zealand, cuddles her son Aaron in 1992, six years after he was injured.

One woman and her tetraplegic son were largely responsible for helping bring in compulsory helmets for cyclists in New Zealand.

Now, some in the cycling community want a change to helmet laws, putting the emphasis on choice, rather than making it compulsory.

Aaron Oaten aged 12, before his accident.

A protest ride against the current law is planned for Wellington on Saturday.

But for Rebecca Oaten, aka The Helmet Lady, it was a different story.

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The Palmerston North woman and her son Aaron travelled the country for six years during the late 1980s and the early 1990s pushing hard for a change to the law.

Her crusade can be traced back to 1986 when Aaron was 12.

One April day, he was knocked off his 10-speed bike on Palmerston North's Pioneer Highway. Helmet-less, his head hit a concrete gutter. He was in a coma for eight months and when he awoke he was paralysed from the neck down, and could not speak.

Rebecca Oaten was committed to making sure some good could come from her son's crash.

She helped launch the Protect the Brains Trust, which spread nationwide and lobbied the Government for a law to make helmets while cycling compulsory.

On January 1, 1994, the law was changed. Then Transport Minister Rob Storey announced the new regulation for cyclists to wear helmets, or face a $35 fine. That fine has since increased.

The idea of people pushing for freedom to not wear a bike helmet was 'lunacy', Oaten said on Tuesday, from her Palmerston North home.

'I can only assume that these people are extremely ill-informed. What these people need to do before they make these silly statements is to go to places like the accident and emergency wards, the hospitals, the rehabilitation wards, and talk to a neurologist and ask them why they need to wear a safety helmet.'

'How many people would take a laptop, balance it on a bike and set off riding across town in the middle of traffic. You know it's going to smash. The human brain is our computer and once that's damaged there's no fixing it, it's done.'

The risk of a crash in New Zealand traffic was real, she said.

'Aaron was not the exception to the rule – it does happen often. And we know what stops that [damage]. A safety helmet works.'

Arguments about individual choice were 'selfish' in the face of the huge cost to ACC to provide treatment and care to those with serious brain injuries, and the effect it has on families, she said.

'Freedom is being able to speak, to walk, to run, to hear. My son could not do any of those things, because he was knocked off his bike by a car.

'Where's the common sense?'

In a 2010 interview, Oaten said she was proud of the role she and Aaron played in making helmets compulsory, and said it was the best thing she could have done.

'Absolutely. I was very angry when Aaron had his accident, and it was probably the kind of anger that would have destroyed me if I hadn't harnessed it.

'It was an extremely cathartic experience for me and I'm glad I did it.'

She said for six years she visited an average of four schools a day, 'lambasting' kids with reasons why they should wear helmets. Fainting pupils were common as she described Aaron's everyday life in graphic detail and showed them the catheter he needed to urinate.

'I used to say, 'If you don't like to wear a safety helmet, boys, would you want to wear one of these and see how you like it?' It was like a domino effect, once the first boy went [fainted], it would be like bang, bang, bang,' she told The Dominion Post.

Aaron Oaten died in hospice care in 2010. He was 37.