Drowning in inequality

The silent geography of those who drown

Let's take Italy. We are used to thinking of drownings as tragedies caused by rough seas, but the data tells a violently classist story. The annual report of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità observatory records 604 fatal drownings in the 2024-2025 biennium, almost equally divided: 281 at sea and 277 in inland waters (rivers, lakes, canals). And the region with the highest count does not have a single meter of coastline: it is Lombardy, with 90 cases.

A disproportionate percentage of immigrants die in those fresh waters: in Lombardy, about half of the victims are foreigners. It is no coincidence; it is pure, ruthless economics. Swimming lessons cost money, trips to the seaside require trains, and beach clubs have unaffordable prices. Rivers (like the Adda, the Ticino, or the Brembo) and provincial lakes, however, are free. Young people dive into them to escape the summer heat, but inland fresh water is treacherous. The impact with 10-15 °C (50-59 °F) currents causes a violent thermal shock, panic, and the resulting respiratory arrest. Those who die in these waters do not do so because of "fate," but because society never provided them with the tools to handle them.

In the Netherlands, a nation built on water, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) has certified that the risk of drowning for children born outside of Europe is over 14 times higher than for their Dutch peers. And the Netherlands is certainly not inattentive to the subject: in 2024, nearly four out of ten Dutch children between 6 and 12 years old held all three school swimming diplomas (A, B, and C). It is a national record. But the research institute that presented it used an emblematic title: the swimming ability of vulnerable children lags behind.

The pools that closed due to racism

If social class is the deciding factor in Europe, in the United States the gap has a frightening racial origin. Across the ocean, drowning kills about 4,000 people a year. And while for the WHO this is the fourth leading cause of child death globally, in the USA it is the number one cause of death for children between 1 and 4 years old.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States federal public health agency) counts 39.5 million American adults who cannot swim. The gap has an unmistakable color: 36.8% of Black adults report not knowing how to swim, compared to just 6.9% of white adults. Mortality rates confirm the slaughter: the highest peaks are recorded among Native Americans (2.6-3.1 deaths per 100,000), followed by Black people (1.5-1.9), and trailing are white people (1.2-1.4).

There is a detail that makes things worse: African American adults objectively spend much less time in the water (in the last six months, 67% have not been in a pool even once). Because those mortality rates are calculated based on the entire population and not on actual time spent in the water, the official numbers glaringly underestimate the true severity of the disparity.

But how did we get here? American public pools were rigidly segregated. When racial integration was imposed by federal law, many municipalities simply chose to close or fill in municipal pools with concrete rather than mix ethnicities, as confirmed not only by historians but by the CDC's own official reports. In place of public pools, private country clubs grew disproportionately, inaccessible to minorities, effectively outsourcing the right to learn to swim only to wealthy white people. A scar that has never healed: after the recent pandemic, drowning rates rose again, surgically striking those who were already dying the most (+28.3% among African Americans in 2021).

Where half the world drowns

In China, drowning is the leading cause of death for children between 1 and 14 years old. And the gap that exists in Italy between natives and foreigners, in China runs clearly between the countryside and the city: for those under twenty, in 2021, the mortality rate was 3.84 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in rural areas, compared to 2.01 in urban ones. Almost double.

Japan, on the other hand, faced this reality in a horrific way in 1955. On May 11, the Shiun Maru ferry sank: 168 dead, including 100 students. Just two months later, on July 28, in Nakagawara, an abnormal current during a school sea lesson dragged dozens of children out to sea: 36 girls drowned. The Japanese response to those traumas was radical: swimming became a mandatory school curriculum and, in the nineties, more than 80% of the country's elementary schools had a functioning pool inside the building.

Yet, today, even Japan is guiltily backtracking. The pools are aging and maintenance is expensive: middle schools equipped with a functioning pool have gone from 73% in 2018 to 65% in 2021. The result is stated by Professor Matsui Atsunori, of Naruto University: "today there is a clear divide between children who attend swimming lessons and those who do not."

The Steel Fisherman and the Theft of Blue Spaces

Those at the top of the food chain know full well that swimming saves lives. Since 1940, the elite MIT in Boston has not issued a degree to any student who has not first passed a strict mandatory swimming test.

In Iceland, this survival dogma is not a requirement for geniuses and the wealthy, but the infrastructure of an entire nation. Since 1943, swimming instruction has been mandatory by law. And it produces documented miracles. In March 1984, twenty-two-year-old Guðlaugur Friðþórsson survived the sinking of his fishing boat in the Atlantic Ocean. He swam in 5 °C (41 °F) water, in total darkness, for six grueling hours toward a lighthouse on the volcanic coast.

When researchers led by W. R. Keatinge published their study in the British Medical Journal to understand how he had escaped lethal hypothermia, they discovered the incredible: his subcutaneous fat layer was dense and up to 14 millimeters thick, or two to three times that of an average human being. Biologically, it functioned similarly to blubber, the insulating adipose tissue typical of seals, protecting internal organs from heat loss. But a biological anomaly alone does not allow one to face six hours of ocean waves without drinking, losing orientation, or giving in to fear. Without the technical endurance and perfect management of panic learned by heart at school since kindergarten, Guðlaugur would never have survived that hell.

But how did we reach the point where floating has become a luxury? Over the last fifty years, there has been an inexorable process of closing off urban blue spaces. Rivers and stretches of metropolitan sea (from the Palermo coastline to the canals of Northern Europe) have been systematically closed to public bathing.

The official cause? Sewage pollution and health risks. A tangle of hypocrisy and management incompetence that we analyze in depth in our dossier on coliform bacteria and urban water. In reality, behind the alibi of "dirty" water, a precise political will has been at work: preference has been given to the construction industry and private operators, abdicating the protection of available natural resources to push citizens into artificial pools.

This has distanced entire generations from open water, outsourcing the right to swim to closed, paid facilities whose costs decide who lives and who dies.

We have calculated the global Real Impact: the percentage of the average daily wage that a citizen must sacrifice to take a single swim in a municipal or affiliated pool. While state subsidies keep swimming democratic in Northern Europe, elsewhere it has become a ruthless privilege. In Milan or Rome — where today it is almost impossible to find a pool for less than €10 — a single dip ends up "burning" almost 14% of a day's work.

(Methodological note: the real impact is an estimate calculated by comparing the ticket price to the net daily wage in each metropolis, estimated on 22 working days per month. Sources for local net income data: processing based on Numbeo, OECD, and ILOSTAT data).

Swimmable Cities and aquatic literacy

Faced with these numbers, reopening urban blue spaces is not just an urban planning battle: it is the only way to democratize access to water. This is exactly what the global network Swimmable Cities promotes, a courageous alliance of administrations and associations that, as we recount in our historical investigation into stolen open waters, fights to dismantle bans and make rivers, lakes, and harbors accessible once again.

But reopening the water is not enough. If we limit ourselves to removing the padlocks, urban rivers will continue to kill those who cannot afford private swimming lessons. The real goal, which international manifestos are beginning to adopt, is swimming literacy: free aquatic education, guaranteed to everyone starting from school.

Teaching people to swim for free in the public spaces where they already live is immensely more powerful than simply reopening them. It creates a process of deep identification with the lived landscape. It builds a community around the city's ecosystem and allows the most marginalized groups to reclaim not only a vital skill for their own safety, but the very soul of their city.

From 2000 to today, the drowning rate worldwide has fallen by 38%. It is irrefutable proof that when people are taught to swim, they stop dying. But for this to happen on a large scale, we must stop selling swimming and start teaching it again where the water flows for free.