Discussion
I've just been having glance at an old Newscientist (25 August 2001), and found this (written by Frank Furedi, a sociologist at The University of Kent at Canterbury), which I thought might be of interest. Relevant to several recent threads, so I thought I’d stick it up in a new one.
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"Have you ever tripped over the pavement? Most people who injure themselves like this probably put it down to their own absent-mindedness, clumsiness-or maybe even drunkenness. But not everyone. Thousands of people in Britain have gone to court and won compensation on the grounds that their injury was the fault of a negligent local authority.
The word "accident", it seems, is out of favour. Safety officials and public health authorities in Britain and the US, led by the American emergency medical profession, want to get rid of it. They claim that most injuries are preventable and that to attribute them to accidents is irresponsible.
Now the British Medical Journal has jumped on the bandwagon. In an editorial in its 2 June issue, the BMJ declared that is was banning the word "accident" from its pages. Even events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and avalanches are often predictable, it argues. The authorities could therefore warn people to avoid places at times of risk. Thus injuries caused by flying debris during a hurricane are not due to an accident, but to a failure to take correct precautions.
Changes in medical terminology are often underpinned by new cultural attitudes. Safety has become one of Western society's fundamental values, and any injury caused by an accident is an affront to this. We find it increasingly hard to deal with uncertainty-partly because of the great progress made in medicine and science. A child's inexplicable illness must have a cause, so blame it on a nearby mobile phone mast.
Misfortune is part of the human condition. Yet today even a single unexpected accident will provoke calls for more regulation. The notion that a person happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time flies in the face of an ethos that demands a cause for every misadventure. Last month, a British school was held responsible by the courts for an injury suffered by one of its 17-year-old pupils on a skiing trip. Although teachers had previously reprimanded the young man for skiing off-piste, he ignored the warning and was severely hurt. An accident? A negligible school, ruled the judge.
Of course, public authorities and private companies should be penalised where they are negligent in carrying out their responsibilities. But today we assign meaning to events that once we would have attributed to chance- or to an act of God- by blaming somebody or some institution. Cleansing our lexicon of the term "accident" feeds the relentless culture of blame. And this is where the legal profession takes over.
It Was Just An Accident . . . Or Was It? is the title of a leaflet published by Accident Line, a British "personal injury referral service" backed by the Law Society that openly encourages people who've been injured to claim compensation. The leaflet points out that many people who believed they had only themselves to blame for their injuries have gone on to make a successful claim. Like the BMJ, Accident Line appears to believe behind that every injury lurks an act of neglect. What used to be seen as a risk worth taking is now, with the benefit of hindsight and a clever lawyer, reinterpreted as culpable negligence.
The blame game undermines any sense of our own personal responsibility. People are discouraged from taking responsibility for disagreeable things that happen to them. This is nowhere more true than with emotional distress. People regularly present stress, trauma and loss of confidence and self-esteem as emotional injuries that ought to be compensated. The pain and trauma experienced by parents when their child dies can now be represented as a form of psychiatric injury. Often, hospitals are blamed for enhancing the emotional pain of the bereaved by handling death insensitively. Is this really justified? Hospitals can indeed be insensitive, but the loss of a child is bound to cause distress. Are there no feelings left for which we bear a measure of existential responsibility?
The truth is, we all have to weigh up the benefits of particular activity against the risk of a negative outcome. For example, if you play football or ski you know that the excitement and enjoyment of sport can be spoiled by a painful injury. A skier or footballer has to learn how to manage the risks.
The BMJ justifies its crusade against the “A-word” by claiming it makes people more aware that injuries are preventable. Preventing injuries is a worthwhile objective, but not all injuries can be prevented. The BMJ’s position demonstrates a profound sense of hostility towards the taking of risks. Risks, it implies, are to be prevented rather than taken, and the are certainly not to be enjoyed.
There is a perfectly effective way of preventing skiing injuries: ban people from skiing. We can prevent bicycling injuries by banning bicycling. But risk is part of life, and an enlightened society recognises that human beings need to take risks.
Scrapping the word “accident” will do little to reduce physical injury. It will however, encourage a climate of intolerance towards risk-taking and experimentation and diminish people’s capacity to engage creatively with the world around them. “Safety at any price” is not a virtue of a rational society. It is a symptom of compulsive behavior."
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Comments?
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"Have you ever tripped over the pavement? Most people who injure themselves like this probably put it down to their own absent-mindedness, clumsiness-or maybe even drunkenness. But not everyone. Thousands of people in Britain have gone to court and won compensation on the grounds that their injury was the fault of a negligent local authority.
The word "accident", it seems, is out of favour. Safety officials and public health authorities in Britain and the US, led by the American emergency medical profession, want to get rid of it. They claim that most injuries are preventable and that to attribute them to accidents is irresponsible.
Now the British Medical Journal has jumped on the bandwagon. In an editorial in its 2 June issue, the BMJ declared that is was banning the word "accident" from its pages. Even events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and avalanches are often predictable, it argues. The authorities could therefore warn people to avoid places at times of risk. Thus injuries caused by flying debris during a hurricane are not due to an accident, but to a failure to take correct precautions.
Changes in medical terminology are often underpinned by new cultural attitudes. Safety has become one of Western society's fundamental values, and any injury caused by an accident is an affront to this. We find it increasingly hard to deal with uncertainty-partly because of the great progress made in medicine and science. A child's inexplicable illness must have a cause, so blame it on a nearby mobile phone mast.
Misfortune is part of the human condition. Yet today even a single unexpected accident will provoke calls for more regulation. The notion that a person happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time flies in the face of an ethos that demands a cause for every misadventure. Last month, a British school was held responsible by the courts for an injury suffered by one of its 17-year-old pupils on a skiing trip. Although teachers had previously reprimanded the young man for skiing off-piste, he ignored the warning and was severely hurt. An accident? A negligible school, ruled the judge.
Of course, public authorities and private companies should be penalised where they are negligent in carrying out their responsibilities. But today we assign meaning to events that once we would have attributed to chance- or to an act of God- by blaming somebody or some institution. Cleansing our lexicon of the term "accident" feeds the relentless culture of blame. And this is where the legal profession takes over.
It Was Just An Accident . . . Or Was It? is the title of a leaflet published by Accident Line, a British "personal injury referral service" backed by the Law Society that openly encourages people who've been injured to claim compensation. The leaflet points out that many people who believed they had only themselves to blame for their injuries have gone on to make a successful claim. Like the BMJ, Accident Line appears to believe behind that every injury lurks an act of neglect. What used to be seen as a risk worth taking is now, with the benefit of hindsight and a clever lawyer, reinterpreted as culpable negligence.
The blame game undermines any sense of our own personal responsibility. People are discouraged from taking responsibility for disagreeable things that happen to them. This is nowhere more true than with emotional distress. People regularly present stress, trauma and loss of confidence and self-esteem as emotional injuries that ought to be compensated. The pain and trauma experienced by parents when their child dies can now be represented as a form of psychiatric injury. Often, hospitals are blamed for enhancing the emotional pain of the bereaved by handling death insensitively. Is this really justified? Hospitals can indeed be insensitive, but the loss of a child is bound to cause distress. Are there no feelings left for which we bear a measure of existential responsibility?
The truth is, we all have to weigh up the benefits of particular activity against the risk of a negative outcome. For example, if you play football or ski you know that the excitement and enjoyment of sport can be spoiled by a painful injury. A skier or footballer has to learn how to manage the risks.
The BMJ justifies its crusade against the “A-word” by claiming it makes people more aware that injuries are preventable. Preventing injuries is a worthwhile objective, but not all injuries can be prevented. The BMJ’s position demonstrates a profound sense of hostility towards the taking of risks. Risks, it implies, are to be prevented rather than taken, and the are certainly not to be enjoyed.
There is a perfectly effective way of preventing skiing injuries: ban people from skiing. We can prevent bicycling injuries by banning bicycling. But risk is part of life, and an enlightened society recognises that human beings need to take risks.
Scrapping the word “accident” will do little to reduce physical injury. It will however, encourage a climate of intolerance towards risk-taking and experimentation and diminish people’s capacity to engage creatively with the world around them. “Safety at any price” is not a virtue of a rational society. It is a symptom of compulsive behavior."
___________________________________________________
Comments?
Fully agree with the article. Risks are part of life, deal with it or lock yourself in a padded room unitl you starve (could choke eating you know).
All the compensation bollocks is nothing to do with having problems dealing with uncertainty, it's down to greedy people & lawyers suing for every bloody thing making companies/councils/hospitals etc try to remove any element that could get them sued.
All the compensation bollocks is nothing to do with having problems dealing with uncertainty, it's down to greedy people & lawyers suing for every bloody thing making companies/councils/hospitals etc try to remove any element that could get them sued.
I think we use the word far too much though.
If someone drives their car into you it's not an accident unless they had a heart attack at the wheel or something else unpredictable using reasonable common sense. If they were going too fast it wasn't an accident unless someone cut their brake pipes and they didn't know or their servo had failed all of a sudden and the car was regularly serviced.
If someone drives their car into you it's not an accident unless they had a heart attack at the wheel or something else unpredictable using reasonable common sense. If they were going too fast it wasn't an accident unless someone cut their brake pipes and they didn't know or their servo had failed all of a sudden and the car was regularly serviced.
I must admit one half of me agrees with Trefor that we use the word accident too freely.
but then the other half kicks in and says where do you draw the line/distinction and how do you legislate for it and if you do what will stop the freefall into litigation that we currently seem to be headed
but then the other half kicks in and says where do you draw the line/distinction and how do you legislate for it and if you do what will stop the freefall into litigation that we currently seem to be headed
Don't get me started on ambulance-chasers. I'm only glad that their recent financial problems seems to have curtailed their advertising on Sky (though it's been replaced by almost-as-annoying loan adverts).
Anyway, I think there's a good distinction to be drawn between "accidents" and "carlessness" and also what I sometimes call "purposes" (i.e. the opposite of an accident -- like that skier mentioned previously, apparently, willful neglect by the victim (although I obviously don't know the circumstances etc)).
What makes me cross is that there's people going round who, several years ago, would have been "evoluted away" with their errors and lack of forethought and instead nowadays they're being rewarded with cash, and treated as victims (painful injuries notwithstanding). It's like a reverse form of Darwinism.
And it's us (i.e. insurance premium payers) who are funding it.
Obviously not all accidents are without some blame on the local authority or whoever, but the pendulum seems to have swung such that the individual is never wrong.
Declan Swan indeed... (and good-on Soccer am for their spoof on that one)
Anyway, I think there's a good distinction to be drawn between "accidents" and "carlessness" and also what I sometimes call "purposes" (i.e. the opposite of an accident -- like that skier mentioned previously, apparently, willful neglect by the victim (although I obviously don't know the circumstances etc)).
What makes me cross is that there's people going round who, several years ago, would have been "evoluted away" with their errors and lack of forethought and instead nowadays they're being rewarded with cash, and treated as victims (painful injuries notwithstanding). It's like a reverse form of Darwinism.
And it's us (i.e. insurance premium payers) who are funding it.
Obviously not all accidents are without some blame on the local authority or whoever, but the pendulum seems to have swung such that the individual is never wrong.
Declan Swan indeed... (and good-on Soccer am for their spoof on that one)
Agree with the article - yet I see what Trefor means and it really is a question of where to draw the line... humans are innately fallable creatures...
IMO the errosion of the concept of personal responsibility for one's actions is going to cause bigger woes than mere litigiousness... taken to the extreme, it'll be the end of humanity as we know it..
Name one activity which is genuinely fun yet exposes the participant(s) to no discernable risk?
You can forget boozing, hooning around, sha**ing, drugs, footy, running, cycling, shooting, dancing, fighting, farting, eating .. the list is endless..
The only positive thing to do is invest massively in a bubble-wrap company because it's only a matter of time before people are festooning themselves and their crappy offspring in the stuff.
IMO the errosion of the concept of personal responsibility for one's actions is going to cause bigger woes than mere litigiousness... taken to the extreme, it'll be the end of humanity as we know it..
Name one activity which is genuinely fun yet exposes the participant(s) to no discernable risk?
You can forget boozing, hooning around, sha**ing, drugs, footy, running, cycling, shooting, dancing, fighting, farting, eating .. the list is endless..
The only positive thing to do is invest massively in a bubble-wrap company because it's only a matter of time before people are festooning themselves and their crappy offspring in the stuff.
There is a fascinating aspect of the human condition, known prosaically as "risk behaviour". simply there is a sliding scale of attitude to risk, and we are all placed on that scale. Some of us totally safety conscious and never do anything to harm ourselves. Others at hte other end of the scale go bungee jumping over a pit of alligators whilst smoking Capstan Full Strength in an oxygen tent. It's all about how far you are prepared to go. Inadvertant injury can happen to anyone, but some people go out of their way to look for risky things, and get off on taking the risk. It is a genetically determined behaviour response, and includes how fast you go in your car, bike, how much you drink, or whatever. And you can do very little about it, because it's built in to your psyche - it is part of how you define yourself.
Accident is a perfectly valid term, since we are not, at all times, totally in control of the circumstances we are surrounded by. I cannot predict when, or if, a psycho in a lorry is going to decide to run me over, or shoot me with a sniper rifle from 400 yards away, or even when someone loses control of their car, and it rolls over and blows up just as I pass by. Accidents DO happen....
Accident is a perfectly valid term, since we are not, at all times, totally in control of the circumstances we are surrounded by. I cannot predict when, or if, a psycho in a lorry is going to decide to run me over, or shoot me with a sniper rifle from 400 yards away, or even when someone loses control of their car, and it rolls over and blows up just as I pass by. Accidents DO happen....
Devils Advocate hat on...
Sometimes the Council could be held responsible, say for example your car shocks shatter as you bounce off a nice pothole.. Do you say it was an accident ? Or do you say, why should I suffer loss of my car due to the road being poorly maintained. But 9 times outta 10 tripping over the pavement is a numpty act.. Then think about how you'd feel if due to a faulty paving slab your nan fell over and broke her arm/hip etc..
With regards to being drunk I think that if someone is innebriated then they lose any right of protection for their idiotic behaviour
This is a bit unfortunate, and the US/UK law doesn't really account for someone being a complete muppet, i.e. on Hot drink, caution, contents hot.. No shit.
An interesting point may be, once more, how would you feel if your mum,brother and sister all got cancer, as did 20 residents down your street, just a year after a new company built a pylon/factory etc...
That one is totally ridiculous, should called him a t**t and left it at that. And then the teachers should sue him for the stress they went through.
I think of late people are not taking responsibilty for Anything.. Got pregnant, not my fault. Have 38 kids by 36 fathers ? Blame the Govt for not stopping me. Kid flashed her nipple ring in class ?? Perfectly fine,she should be allowed to 'express' herself.. Its a bit toooo liberal for me...
The law treats this as Volenti Non Fit Injuria. you know that there is a chance of injury if you partake in a sport, so no recourse if you get injured.
devils hat off
Completely agree with nubbin, as far as I am aware there is a set mentality that each person has which assesses risk and even the desire for danger. I think most of us on here have it, it is why I drive fast, jump outta planes, and swim with sharks..
What we also need to do is get some Judges who actually inhabit that strange and unusual place known to most of us as 'The Real World' wherein people who injure themselves purely because they are stupid get Sweeet FA.
>> Edited by Jason F on Friday 19th April 18:44
quote:
"Have you ever tripped over the pavement? Most people who injure themselves like this probably put it down to their own absent-mindedness, clumsiness-or maybe even drunkenness. But not everyone. Thousands of people in Britain have gone to court and won compensation on the grounds that their injury was the fault of a negligent local authority.
Sometimes the Council could be held responsible, say for example your car shocks shatter as you bounce off a nice pothole.. Do you say it was an accident ? Or do you say, why should I suffer loss of my car due to the road being poorly maintained. But 9 times outta 10 tripping over the pavement is a numpty act.. Then think about how you'd feel if due to a faulty paving slab your nan fell over and broke her arm/hip etc..
With regards to being drunk I think that if someone is innebriated then they lose any right of protection for their idiotic behaviour
quote:
The word "accident", it seems, is out of favour. Safety officials and public health authorities in Britain and the US, led by the American emergency medical profession, want to get rid of it. They claim that most injuries are preventable and that to attribute them to accidents is irresponsible.
This is a bit unfortunate, and the US/UK law doesn't really account for someone being a complete muppet, i.e. on Hot drink, caution, contents hot.. No shit.
quote:
We find it increasingly hard to deal with uncertainty-partly because of the great progress made in medicine and science. A child's inexplicable illness must have a cause, so blame it on a nearby mobile phone mast.
An interesting point may be, once more, how would you feel if your mum,brother and sister all got cancer, as did 20 residents down your street, just a year after a new company built a pylon/factory etc...
quote:
Last month, a British school was held responsible by the courts for an injury suffered by one of its 17-year-old pupils on a skiing trip. Although teachers had previously reprimanded the young man for skiing off-piste, he ignored the warning and was severely hurt. An accident? A negligible school, ruled the judge.
That one is totally ridiculous, should called him a t**t and left it at that. And then the teachers should sue him for the stress they went through.
quote:
People are discouraged from taking responsibility for disagreeable things that happen to them
I think of late people are not taking responsibilty for Anything.. Got pregnant, not my fault. Have 38 kids by 36 fathers ? Blame the Govt for not stopping me. Kid flashed her nipple ring in class ?? Perfectly fine,she should be allowed to 'express' herself.. Its a bit toooo liberal for me...
quote:
For example, if you play football or ski you know that the excitement and enjoyment of sport can be spoiled by a painful injury. A skier or footballer has to learn how to manage the risks.
The law treats this as Volenti Non Fit Injuria. you know that there is a chance of injury if you partake in a sport, so no recourse if you get injured.
devils hat off
Completely agree with nubbin, as far as I am aware there is a set mentality that each person has which assesses risk and even the desire for danger. I think most of us on here have it, it is why I drive fast, jump outta planes, and swim with sharks..
What we also need to do is get some Judges who actually inhabit that strange and unusual place known to most of us as 'The Real World' wherein people who injure themselves purely because they are stupid get Sweeet FA.
>> Edited by Jason F on Friday 19th April 18:44
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