Risk is OK - Courts decide

The benefit of healthy risk-taking outweigh the risks 

 Beales -v- The Scouts

In the recent case of Beales -v- The Scouts Assc the court was asked to
consider whether the Assc. were negligent in running a game which
involved the children jumping over a rope with a bag tied to the end.

RSA - Risk and Childhood Response - see www.culturewars.org.uk  for full discourse...

Ian Lewis, of Campaign for Adventure – Risk and Enterprise in Society, and clerk of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adventure and Recreation in Society, put up a valiant effort to counter this state of affairs. He talked enthusiastically about testing young people’s ‘adventure thresholds’, setting ‘new horizons’, and berated us to ‘change our own perceptions of the possible’. Dr Tony Sewell, CEO of Generating Genius and a columnist with the black community newspaper The Voice, also injected a much needed dose of inspiration. He echoed Lewis’s warning that in the absence of sufficient risk taking opportunities children will seek it out in the kind of activities society frowns upon, like drug use and antisocial behaviour. If we don’t provide young people with the opportunities to take risks, he said, they’ll seek out bad risks and join gangs. We need more ‘controlled risk’ he continued.

Culture Wars is the reviews website of the Institute of Ideas (IoI) in London. In keeping with the IoI's aim of shaping the future through debate, we review books, films, theatre, art and talk events, with a view to understanding how political and other ideas filter through the culture, and how the arts in turn influence politics and culture more generally. We also publish essays, interviews and other articles on the arts, culture and society.