Safety and Security – similar or different fields of research and practice?

Several scholars have claimed that it is meaningful to distinguish between safety and security in order to separate fields of handling risks and crisis. Protection from terrorism or other intentional crimes is denoted... [ view full abstract ]

Several scholars have claimed that it is meaningful to distinguish between safety and security in order to separate fields of handling risks and crisis. Protection from terrorism or other intentional crimes is denoted security, while safety implies protection from unintentional acts. According to these scholars, the difference lies in whether the incident is inflicted intentionally or not; the characteristics of a safety risk bear the suggestion of being accidental and security is intentional or deliberate. This implies that, in the case of security, an aggressor is present who is influenced by the physical environment and by personal factors. This differentiation between safety and security are meaningful to many scholars and practitioners and are often used, for example in aviation, to describe two different approaches for handling risks. However, the responsibility for handling security risks is no longer solely a responsibility of the state. While security related to intentional acts, such as terrorism, used to be an area of secrecy where security services played the major part in prevention, the responsibility for creating resilience and managing the threat of terrorism have nowadays become an area where citizens, companies and different official bodies have a shared responsibility. This is reflected in the many official strategies against terrorism published in most Western countries in recent years. This responsibility poses a challenge to organization because while the risk management of safety risk has become a distinguished field in research, the same claim cannot be made concerning the field of security. This paper discusses the relation and demarcation between safety and security, and discusses whether these fields should be seen as to separate fields for handling risks or whether it would be beneficial to see them as one field. The paper concludes that, although the characteristics of safety and security risks are inherently different, the methodology used in organizational risk management will in many respects be similar. Further research is needed to address these issues.