Child Accident/Injury Prevention in Risk Society: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Unintentional injury is now the principle cause of child death in developed nations, and the prevention of it has become a key focus of health professionals. This paper presents a sociological/philosophical enquiry into child accident prevention discourse and its implications for practice. With a critical distillation of major child accident prevention literature spanning the last two decades, significant findings, recommendations and themes are identified. It is observed which preventative measures have been deemed successful, with the placement of strategies into the appropriate ‘E’ category - education, engineering, enforcement, and environment. This process demonstrates the difficulties with and paradoxes inherent in the notion of accident prevention and buttresses a central hypothesis: that the child accident or injury in risk society is simultaneously predictable and random; knowable at a statistical level but enigmatic at an individual one. The accident, previously configured as unpredictable and inexplicable, has become wholly subject to risk society’s raison d’etre, the laws of probability, and is thus rendered predictable and preventable on a magnified scale.