Ridiculously risk averse
Don’t blame terrorism — we did this to ourselves.
One wonders what our new Syrian friends, having fled Syrian President Bashar al- Assad’s barrel bombs and endured untold miseries en route to their new home, will make of Canadians’ approach to risk management. One wonders, for example, what they will make of the various school boards who have deemed it imprudent to have any of their students take organized trips to Europe — you know, that place many hundreds of Syrians have perished trying to get to — because of the threat of terrorism. And one wonders, for example, what they will make of a Toronto school’s decision to ban the game of tag, according to a CTV report, because “students received scrapes, bruises and sprains as a result of the game, and at least one child suffered a fractured leg.”
Some might reasonably wonder why a people so blessedly safe from the world’s real and present dangers would spend their lives inventing and worrying about ridiculous ones. And many would probably realize, as surely even the people behind these policies must at some level, that these decisions are statistical and intellectual abominations.
The greatest part about Toronto’s St. Luke Catholic School banning tag is that having made the decision, according to CTV, “the school ( then) contacted Toronto Public Health, requesting a representative attend … to advise teachers about active but not dangerous physical activity.” What this representative should tell the school is that by the standard of “danger” they are trying to mitigate, there is no advice to be offered.
To say nothing of the plague of childhood bruises and scrapes and sundry other boo- boos, kids break bones. They just do. Between 1990 and 2007, the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP) recorded an average of around 13,000 emergency room visits per year among children aged five to 14 involving fractures.
“Activities” would have been implicated in some of them: skiing, skating, hockey, lacrosse, quidditch. But also bunk beds — around 84 fractures a year among the under-20 set, by the CHIRPP’s reckoning; non-bunk beds — 504 fractures; and couches and sofas — 283 fractures.
Those numbers are from the Public Health Agency of Canada’s 2009 Child and Youth Injury in Review publication, which focused on consumer products. The 2012 edition focused on transport safety. Because this is Canada, where comparable data are viewed as suspiciously as unsupervised childhood recreation, it measured injuries among Canadians under 25 — but you’ll get the picture. Never mind automobiles. In 2008- 09, 11 children and youth broke bones on city buses and 13 — oh dear — on school buses.
Each of the victims could have avoided their specific fate had they walked or biked instead, but then they would have faced even more risk of fracture. CHIRPP reported 536 bicycle-related fractures in 2006 alone. Safe Kids Canada reports that an average of 30 child pedestrians are killed in Canada every year, and 2,412 injured — fractures being the most common kind. Or, God help them, a parent might have offered them a ride in a car, which is where something like 70 kids a year die and 900 are injured.
Of course, the vast majority of them would end up better off for having used a form of active transportation. Living a good life involves accepting all kinds of risks every day. Maybe that old lady in the blocklong Buick will mistake the gas for the brake, but you’re still going to cross the street. No one would stop taking buses because people very occasionally get hurt on them. Right?
Well, it’s probably best not to ask anyone at your kid’s school that kind of question. “Recent media reports advise that there have been 355 mass shootings in 336 days in the United States, which confirms that acts of violence can occur anywhere at any time,” read a memo sent this week to staff at the Edmonton Catholic School District. “With recent events in Paris and California, and heightened concerns in other cities, we feel it best to limit our travels to within Canada for the remainder of this school year.”
Right. Canada. Where nothing bad ever happened to any kid — ever.
“Our preliminary indication is that the risk exceeds the benefits,” Terry Riley of the Medicine Hat, Alta., school board told the local news organ. Alas, it is very difficult to quantify the “benefit” of, say, a local rugby team’s planned March break trip to Ireland. ( Who the hell is afraid of going to Ireland, of all places?) Instead, decision- makers seem increasingly to assign a value of zero to any experience whatsoever that has been identified as possibly leading to injury or death. And as that’s just about every experience imaginable, in the long term if not the short, doing nothing always wins.
Don’t blame lawyers. Don’t blame insurance companies. Don’t blame ISIL. We did this to ourselves. It’s pathetic and mortifying. And we can undo it before we infect another generation with this idiocy.
Some might reasonably wonder why a people so blessedly safe from the world’s real and present dangers would spend their lives inventing and worrying about ridiculous ones