Abstract
Road accidents and their consequences raise issues in a number of areas of the law. Even a minor road accident can be an alarming or traumatic event and can result in physical and/or psychiatric injury. Most road accidents are caused by negligence, and for the purposes of the civil law of tort, this includes more serious acts which may be regarded as reckless. The ‘sudden impact’ requirement can present difficulties in other areas of psychiatric injury, although there should be no difficulty in showing that a road accident will satisfy the requirement of being ‘shocking’ to both primary and secondary victims. The secondary victim must stand in some special relationship to the person injured or imperilled, and must be present at the road accident, or at its immediate aftermath. The accident must also be ‘shocking’ to a person of, what is quaintly described in the cases as, ‘customary phlegm’ or ‘normal fortitude’.
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