Everyone who has studied tort is familiar with the difficulties faced by secondary victims in seeking to make a recovery for psychiatric harm or shock suffered in relation to being a party to shocking events without themselves suffering any physical harm. There are a plethora of reported cases for you to draw on in any essays on the subject.

In McLouglin v O’Brian [1983] a woman told of an accident involving her husband and children two hours after it had happened was able to recover; she saw her husband and children in hospital seriously injured – and dead in the case of one child. The court determined that there had to be proximity in time and space between the tortious event and the suffering of nervous shock and that there had to be a close familial relationship.

The recent case of Young v Downey [2020] adds to the law. The claimant had been a young child aged four and a half in 1982. Her father had dropped her at nursery and she had seen him ride away in his military uniform. She had continued watching from the window at the nursery and had heard an IRA bomb detonate in the park. She had then seen soldiers in the same uniform as her father running around, some had been covered in blood. Her father died as a result of injuries suffered in the blast and she sought to make a recovery for nervous shock. While the court exercised discretion in relation to limitation periods it concluded that at her young age she could not have understood that what she heard and saw related to the death of her father. The court found that had she been an adult she would have been able to recover as a secondary victim as she would have been able to meet the test in the Hillsborough case of Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police [1992]. Leave to appeal was granted – this may be one to look out for!