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Youth Sports & Public Health: Framing Risks of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in American Football and Ice Hockey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Kathleen E. Bachynski  and
Daniel S. Goldberg
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Extract

Children in North America, some as young as eleven or twelve, routinely don helmets and pads and are trained to move at high-speed for the purpose of engaging in repeated full-body collisions with each other. The evidence suggests that the forces generated by such impacts are sufficient to cause traumatic brain injury (TBI) among children. Moreover, there is only limited evidence supporting the efficacy of interventions typically used to reduce the risks of such hazards. What kind of risk assessment enables such activities to be a relatively common feature of childhood in Canadian and American society?

In order to understand this state of affairs, we must examine the particular risk frame under which such hazards are commonly assumed. Risk assessments are embedded in the cultures in which they are situated and must be evaluated in their social contexts.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Fall 2014 , pp. 323 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2014

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