Legal approaches to injury prevention.

ABSTRACT

Injury prevention can be achieved, but it will require a fundamental reexamination of our approach to injury causation. We must learn to examine the manufacturing and marketing practices of companies that produce the products associated with children's injuries, for these are the real culprits in our national childhood injury plague. Most importantly, we must learn to demand from industry that it take injury prevention seriously. If it refuses to do so it must face the consequences before the American system of justice. Legal advocacy can be a valuable tool in this effort. The legal system provides the means to pierce the corporate veil of secrecy and to learn how and why products are made of hazardous design. Under the light of public scrutiny, culprit companies can be made to pay the price for producing hazardous products. Only in this manner will industry be given the incentive to increase product safety.