Policy-making examples

In some cases, an issue or problem that arises in a park has led to real harm. People naturally feel sad and afraid that the same thing will happen again. How can we respond compassionately and appropriately to the fear and sorrow caused by the loss and tragedy and also make sure that we act wisely to prevent further harm?

Here’s one example of a tragedy that occurred in a park some years ago:

A child was strangled by the drawstring on her jacket while coming down a slide in a playground. At the time, it understandably raised great fear of the same thing happening to other children - our kids, or kids we know.

How do we honour and mourn this loss and at the same time, do our best to make sure that other children are not harmed playing in a playground?

One idea might be to put up a small plaque in memory of the child which tells the story of what happened and the danger of drawstrings.

If we fail to pay attention to the real sadness and fear we feel, we might react to this fear in an impulsive, blunt way to give ourselves the feeling that “something is being done”. For example, we might replace all of the playground in the city and province with new “safer” playground equipment and implement on-going purchasing of new playground equipment as each new set of “playground standards” are issued. * (This is, in fact, what happened in Ontario and Toronto in 1999 - see Celos /database/Playground Correspondence

Unfortunately, this won’t address the actual problem and the simple fact that the child was killed by her drawstring and not because of the slide. We won’t have met our goal of doing our best to prevent this from happening again. Instead, we will spend millions of dollars on initial and on-going replacements costs to give ourselves the illusion that the children are now safe. And we may find that this updated “safer” equipment is uninteresting and no longer widely used by the numbers of children who loved the old equipment.