HAVE you ever tripped over on the pavement? Most people who injure themselves
like this probably put it down to their own absent-mindedness,
clumsiness鈥攐r 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 鈥渁ccident鈥�, 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 it was banning the word 鈥渁ccident鈥�
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 the injuries caused by flying debris during
a hurricane are due not to an accident, but to a failure to take correct
precautions.
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Changes in medical terminology are often underpinned by new cultural
attitudes. Safety has become one of Western society鈥檚 fundamental values, and
any injury caused by an accident is an affront to this. We find it increasingly
hard to deal with uncertainty鈥攑artly because of the great progress made in
medicine and science. A child鈥檚 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 warnings and was
severely hurt. An accident? A negligent 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鈥攐r to an
act of God鈥攂y blaming somebody or some institution. Cleansing our lexicon
of the term 鈥渁ccident鈥� 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 鈥減ersonal injury referral service鈥� backed by the Law
Society that openly encourages people who鈥檝e 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 that behind 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 a 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 spoilt by a painful
injury. A skier or footballer has to learn how to manage the risks.
The BMJ justifies its crusade against the 鈥淎-word鈥� 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鈥檚 position
demonstrates a profound sense of hostility towards the taking of risks. Risks,
it implies, are to be prevented rather than taken, and they 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 鈥渁ccident鈥� will do little to reduce physical injury. It
will, however, encourage a climate of intolerance towards risk-taking and
experimentation and diminish people鈥檚 capacity to engage creatively with the
world around them. 鈥淪afety at any price鈥� is not a virtue of a rational society.
It is a symptom of compulsive behaviour.