Criticism
RoSPA has been accused of being professional killjoys or busybodies, having an unduly risk-averse approach and taking a bureaucratic and inflexible approach to interpreting health and safety legislation. However, in response to this, the charity has started advocating allowing a degree of risk-taking in children's play.
In this vein, RoSPA has established the Child Safety Education Coalition (CSEC), an organisation that aims to allow children to experience risks and learn from them. It encourages children to take part in all activities they wish to, whilst providing them with enough information to manage their own safety.
The 'professional killjoy' label has been difficult to shake off - perhaps unfairly, as RoSPA's mantra is 'sensible safety', trying to strike a balance between encouraging people to live their lives to the full, whilst educating the public in mitigating risks and carrying out activities safely. It has always advocated that activities inside and outside the workplace should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.
Read more about this topic: Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)