Nowhere is the tension between the need to prevent risk and the necessity of learning to manage and take calculated risks more apparent than in the process of growing up from childhood to adulthood. Survival of the individual and of the social group has always relied on ensuring a balance between protecting the very young from danger and allowing the child to experiment and learn to navigate the risks and dangers encountered in daily life. In some circumstances, risk taking is socially approved and rewarded – in business life, in record-breaking sports activities or in action in military service, for instance. Increasingly, however, the concept of ‘risk’ has become associated with harmful or negative events and behaviours, which can be predicted, measured and avoided or minimised through timely, responsible action (Douglas, 1992; Lupton and Tulloch, 2002; McWhirter and South, 2004).

The move towards a ‘culture of caution’, where, for most people most of the time, risks must be prevented, has come to dominate social and health policy. This, it could be argued, is to the detriment of understanding and responding to risk as an essential, unavoidable and sometimes positive element of the human condition (Green et al, 2000). It also undermines the important relationship between risk taking and building resilience. An individual's resilience – the capacity to draw on their own resources to withstand unpredictable events that are a part of everyday life – is developed through taking risks and learning to cope with the unexpected (Gilligan, 1997). However, much of the discourse on risk views risk-taking actions and behaviour as bound up with ‘ignorance’ and ‘irrationality’ and often fails to take into account the voluntary nature of risk taking and the pleasures and benefits that can be derived from ‘risky’ activities. How risk is defined and understood has important implications for the development of policy and intervention to address the dangers that children and young people face as they grow up.

Over time, in health and social welfare (as in other policy domains), we have seen shifts in the perception of risk. The pre-modern notion of risk as an unpredictable ‘act of God’ was replaced with the modern ‘scientific’ view that it was an inevitable aspect of life, which could nevertheless be managed and contained.