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Whiplash claims appear to have been in the news a bit recently, but once again they're largely being dismissed as being trivial or fraudulent, particularly in the comments that the online versions of newspapers allow underneath their stories.
Probably the most famous of these is the 'fat chav' story, in which a leaked document showed that some irate driver had drawn a very unflattering cartoon of a woman who was making a claim against him. While the real story here is breach of privacy - the man's name was revealed in the leaked document - and the Basil Fawlty-type explosion of rage in an inappropriate context, it is still surprising how little comment there was to remind people that whiplash is a serious neck injury.
She may, after all, be the one telling the truth. It's worth remembering that people should be thought innocent until proven guilty, in allegations of fraudulent whiplash claims as much as anything else.
Similarly, there's been little sympathy for the driving examiner who claimed to have suffered whiplash from the "worst driving test ever"; you'd expect the insurers to deny liability, and to claim that a £15,000 claim is excessive, but where are the voices saying that he was unable to work as a result of the neck injury?
He won the right to damages in the compensation claim, so there must have been at least one convincing voice - his personal injury lawyer - on his side, but it's not unusual to hear comments such as the columnist at Autoevolution whose take on the case was that there was "no reason to make such a fuss about it..."
It's not that I want to deny that there are fraudulent whiplash compensation claims; that would be absurdly optimistic. We've written here about the ways in which fraud can be detected, and it's in the interest of every no win, no fee compensation firm to ensure that they only take on claims they believe to be deserving cases.
I'm not even sure I want to quibble with the figures produced by insurance firms, who suggest that 40 percent of whiplash claims are dodgy in some way - although that seems highish in our experience, and the sources are the people who would benefit from that being true.
Supposing it is, that's still the majority being viable, honest claims that do deserve the kind of compensation available for car accidents caused by other people. Just on a statistical basis, it would make more sense for reporters in newspapers and their readers to assume, on the balance of probability, that a whiplash claim is legitimate until we hear otherwise. If we do hear otherwise, you can be sure that we'll be as outraged as anyone at the abuse of the compensation claim system that we work in.
