Hillsborough Stadium Disaster Research Articles

Early Buddhist perspectives on social memorialization

Social disasters are more than just accidents or technological disasters, they are defined as disasters stemming from a variety of causes that affect human life, property, and the stability of a country or society. These disasters can take many forms, including terrorism, crime, and violence, and have a profound impact on individuals and the public. How we respond after an event, especially how we treat victims, is crucial. In cases such as the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster in the United Kingdom and the 2022 Itaewon tragedy in South Korea, we see a lack of adequate and sufficient response, and the nature of the problem becomes an ideological conflict. This is the result of a misperception of reality and intentional distortion of the problem, which in turn leads to social conflict and increased costs. In Buddhism, these problems can be solved through compassion and right view. Resolution is about effectively healing the aftermath of a disaster and changing our consciousness to prevent it from happening again. When the social memorialization and healing of a disaster is done properly, our society can regain stability and the victims can return to their daily lives. In particular, we can effectively respond to social disasters through four immeasurable states of mind based on the Four Noble Truths.

Stadium Disasters

Introduction:Stadiums are an important part of the entertainment and sporting cultures of communities around the world, but the combination of outdated infrastructure with poor safety planning, large numbers of people gathering within a confined space, and the high frequency of such events have led to a number of significant disasters in the past.This is a descriptive analysis of stadium disasters occurring between 1901-2021 which may provide useful insight for event safety personnel and disaster medicine specialists to better prevent and mitigate the effects of potential future stadium disasters.Method:Data was collected using a retrospective database search of the Emergency Events Database (EM-DATS) for all stadium-related accidental disasters occurring between January 1, 1901-July 30, 2022. A disaster is defined by CRED in its glossary as “technological accidents of an industrial nature, or involving industrial buildings”. All categories and definitions are predetermined by the EM-DATS as per their glossary.Results:The May 24, 1964 Estadio Nacional disaster in Lima, Peru was the worst (in terms of deaths) to date with 350 deaths. This is followed by the 1982 Luzhniki Stadium disaster in Moscow, Russia (340 deaths), the 2001 Accra Sport Stadium disaster in Ghana (123 deaths), and the 1985 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England (96 deaths) as well as 14 of the 40 stadium disasters occurred in Africa, 11 in Europe, 10 in the Americas, and five in Asia.Conclusion:A total of 40 stadium disasters were included, leading to 2,025 deaths and 6,640 injuries. This equated to an average of 50.6 deaths and 166.0 injuries per disaster. Given the potential risk of mass casualty events, stadiums should incorporate disaster medicine education, training, and expertise in their emergency medical plans.

Pandemic publishing: A bibliometric review of COVID‐19 research in the crisis and disaster literature

Iconic events have traditionally instigated progression in the fields of crisis and disaster science. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressing question is how this global health emergency impacted the research agendas of our field. We reviewed contributions in ten important crisis and disaster journals in the two and a half years following the COVID-19 outbreak from 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2022. Specifically, we conducted a bibliometric review using thematic mapping analysis to distill the major themes covered by the emerging COVID-19 literature within crisis and disaster science (N = 239 articles). Our results indicate that several well-known topics are applied to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as risk, crisis communication, governance, resilience and vulnerability. The pandemic also gave rise to new topics, such as citizen behavior, state power, and the business and mental health impact of crisis measures. Several studies are already looking ahead by identifying lessons for preparedness and mitigation of future pandemics. By taking stock of the surge of COVID-19 studies while this academic literature is still taking shape, this review sets the stage for future contributions to the crisis and disaster literatures. It provides valuable lessons for what topics are studied and what themes need more attention. The COVID-19 pandemic is destined to become an iconic event for our literature that not only strengthens and deepens existing debates, but also clearly offers the opportunity to draw in new perspectives and broaden the horizon of crisis and disaster science.

Integrity in Public Life: Reflections on a Duty of Candour

This article will evaluate whether a “duty of candour” on public employees including specifically health practitioners and police officers is an effective mechanism in terms for improving trust and openness. This is the context of the actions of the police in relation to the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989 where 96 soccer fans died at the match due to ineffective policing. The formal identification of responsibility on the part of the police despite the attempt by the police to attribute blame elsewhere, was the starting point of a proposal for an explicit duty on officials in public bodies such as the police to tell the truth and be under a statutory “duty of candour.” The article provides an overview of the duty of candour, its subsequent development, legislatively and professionally in the context of the British health care system, where it currently exists, and the potential impact for the police. It is argued that engagement with the paradox between professional and organizational duty expressed through the language of culture and truth telling is necessary to reassert the importance of trust and integrity in a range of public bodies.

‘We are the vocal minority’: The Safe Standing movement and breaking down the state in English football

Lord Justice Taylor’s final report into the Hillsborough stadium disaster recommended that all Premier League and Championship football grounds in England and Wales should become all-seated and that football supporters would eventually become ‘accustomed and educated to sitting’. Thirty years later, thousands of fans continue to stand at matches but in areas not designed for them to do so. This ritual has become a source of conflict between clubs, supporters and official safety bodies. In 2018, the UK Sports Minister claimed that despite this problem, there remained no desire amongst top clubs to change the all-seating policy and that it was only a ‘vocal minority’ who wanted to see the permanent return of standing in English football. However, supporters, networked through the national Football Supporters Association, had been actively mobilizing a social movement against the legislation for over 20 years. In this article, I use relational sociology to analyse empirical snapshots of the latest phase of this movement, ‘Safe Standing’, to show how the switching and cooperation of supporter networks and their tactics were successful in breaking down the state to create new political opportunities. In doing so, the article reveals the key characteristics of safe standing, including conflict, organizational form and intersubjective motivations, to represent the collective – but also often complex and contradictory – responses to the neoliberal political economy which English football, and society more broadly, has inhabited over the past 30 years.

English hooligans and Italian ultras sport, culture and national policy narratives

ABSTRACTHow has football hooliganism in England, largely, been successfully managed or displaced over the past 30 years, while violence and disorder caused by sections of the ultras movement in Italy continues to dog the domestic Italian game? This paper tries to map out the relevant developments off, as well as on, the sporting landscapes in each of these countries. Many European states have looked, simply, to legislative changes and to reforms in policing and stewarding in England, without understanding how these have been combined with a wider cultural transformation of the fan experience at football matches in a new generation of highly priced, modernized and highly regulated stadia. The Hillsborough Stadium disaster in England in 1989 - not caused by hooliganism but predicated upon expectations it might occur – provided for something of a sea change in public attitudes towards the game and football fans. It also changed the prevailing rhetoric inside English stadia from a struggle over who controls stadium space to one focused on pacification and fan safety. A forced stadium modernization programme in England in the 1990s marginalized hooligan cultures from the global sporting product the EPL has since become. By contrast, in Italy less of this modernization, or change in attitudes or approach, has occurred in quite the same way. Violent ultras in Italy are more politicized and wield more power in the Italian game than their equivalents do in England. Moreover, no major trauma has occurred in Italy to aid radically re-positioning the domestic game.

Discussion: Critical assessment of evidence related to the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, UK

Discussion: Critical assessment of evidence related to the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, UK

Critical assessment of evidence related to the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, UK

The Hillsborough Stadium disaster that unfolded on the Leppings Lane terrace of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club’s ground in Sheffield, UK, on 15 April 1989 resulted in 96 fatalities. Evidence presented to the initial 1989 inquiry, the 1991 civil court case and the 2016 inquest is critically assessed, together with additional relevant research findings. The matters discussed are concerned with fundamental technical principles that provide for spectator safety on terraces such as that on which the disaster unfolded. This paper examines the significance as to the lack of compliance with the applicable guidance. The terrace barrier testing undertaken prior to the disaster is examined and considered inadequate.

The Hillsborough disaster: how it has changed UK healthcare law. Part 1.

The 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster was commemorated this year with memorial services and a toll of bells to remember the 96 who died that day. Their legacy is largely seen in safe, modern, all-seat stadia but it endures beyond football. Court cases resulting from the aftermath of the tragedy have helped shape healthcare law in the UK and in a short series of articles Richard Griffith highlights the impact the Hillsborough disaster has had, beginning with the development of the law in relation to psychiatric injury arising from another's negligent act.

Case Law on Artificial Nutrition and Hydration Since Bland

The legal basis and principles for the lawful withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) from people in a persistent vegetative state (now termed permanent vegetative state), was laid out in the case of Anthony Bland, who sustained catastrophic and irreversible brain damage as a result of being crushed during the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989. Anthony Bland was medically diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery or improvement. Since the Bland case the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Human Rights Act 1998 have been introduced and must be considered in all such cases. This article provides an update of the legal basis for the withdrawal of ANH from people in a permanent vegetative state or a minimally conscious state. In this regard, it analyses the cases of Re C [2010] and W vs M & Ors [2011]. Analysis of these cases demonstrates the decision-making process and current legal basis for the lawful withdrawal or withholding of ANH from people in a permanent vegetative state or a minimally conscious state. Conflicts of interest: none

Mourning and loss: Finding meaning in the mourning for Hillsborough

This paper focuses on the public mourning following the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989. It does so in particular by concentrating on two different sites of analysis: the books of condolence signed in its aftermath and the personal and unexpected reactions of the author following the disaster. Each, it suggests, can be seen as exercises in meaning-making: practical and discursive attempts to make death, as well as loss, intelligible. Mourning in general, and vicarious grief in particular, of the sort occasioned by public disaster, it argues, provide a capaciousness of meaning in which multiple losses may co-exist. Whether symbolic or real, individual or collective, loss of various kinds is routinely, if obliquely and enigmatically, inserted one within the other, the event of death providing an opportunity for loss which has not been properly acknowledged or grieved to come into the open. Deploying a cultural psychoanalysis, the article attempts to unravel the cultural dynamics of mourning, examining processes of identity and identification in ways that (a) are integral to mourning, (b) reveal how meaning is culturally constructed, and (c) provide important clues as to what, or for whom, exactly, the public mourner is mourning.

Knowledge of Service Loads – The Key to Structural Integrity

This paper emphasises the importance of the knowledge of service loads to both the initial design process and the maintenance of structural integrity during the lifetime of engineering components and structures. Three case studies are presented. All involve accidents which caused major loss of life: the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Britain, the German ICE train crash at Eschede and the China Airlines disaster off Taiwan.

Withholding and letting die

In the case involving Tony Bland, the spectator who was crushed in the Hillsborough stadium disaster, the House of Lords recognised that there was a distinction between killing and letting die (Airedale, 1993). To let nature take its course when the prognosis is appaling for the patient and there is no longer a duty to keep a person alive at all costs, is not contrary to the law. On the contrary to take action to end a person's life may be murder or manslaughter.

RCN support for members who cared for Tony Bland.

The Royal College of Nursing has offered support to members who were caring for Tony Bland, the football fan who died last week nearly four years after being crushed in the Hillsborough Stadium disaster.