Criminal obsessions: crime isn't the only harm

Abstract

A month before Christmas a close friend was ice-skating with her daughter on an open-air ice rink. She fell and broke her arm in two places after hitting a rough patch on the ice. She was off work for a number of days and spent many hours in hospital. Subsequently, she discovered that five people that week had broken their arms after falling on the same rink. It was obvious that a combination of too many skaters and lack of maintenance were key elements in the ‘accidents’. There is no legal requirement that these falls are ‘notified’ to a central government department and published on a regular basis. They will form part of some set of ‘accident’ statistics but will receive very little media attention when published. Now imagine the uproar if five people had been attacked in a city centre on five separate occasions and all had their arms broken. There would be a public uproar demanding that the Chief Constable do something about it. Moreover, the events would be recorded in the police statistics.