There are accidents and there are “accidents”

Sonnie Bailey

17 January 2017

An excerpt from Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous, by David Ropeik and George Gray:

The ‘A’ word, accidents, is somewhat controversial in the field of injury prevention. Many experts are happy that the word accidents implies that these events are a matter of fate, that they are nobody’s fault, and that there’s nothing we can do about them. They worry that such an attitude leaves us resigned to accidents, instead of looking for ways to prevent them.

For example, in relation to motor vehicle “accidents”:

many police organisations no longer use the word accident, preferring the word crash. They contend that no crash occurs that might not have been somehow avoided, and that therefore the word accident is inaccurate. 


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