Senior Reporter
kay-marie.fletcher@guardian.co.tt
Psychiatrist Dr Varma Deyalsingh is calling on Government to establish a comprehensive national census and tracking system to monitor citizens from birth until death.
He explained that this would be done to ensure issues such as abuse, children not attending school, and people going missing but not reported to the police are flagged.
His advice comes after the skeletal remains of 18-year-old Hannah Mathura were found in a shallow grave at her family’s home at Butu Road in Valsayn on Tuesday and the troubling allegations made since then.
Speaking to Guardian Media via telephone yesterday, Deyalsingh said while it will be costly and time-consuming, it is something that the State should strongly consider going forward.
“We as a society, how would we know something like this? How would we know that there is a disappearance of an individual? Now it is here where the government needs to come to act. Because the government will not go into every home and know if something has happened.
“What we need is to establish that the minute somebody gives birth, that child is registered and we track that child throughout adulthood … We may not have to develop a system where social workers check (on households) to know if that person has either migrated or not living in that home, married now and elsewhere… We will have to do this to have a greater degree of accuracy of the population of who is missing, etcetera,” he said.
‘Don’t condemn the Mathura children’
The Mathura family had eight children including Hannah.
And while the majority of them are adults now, Deyalsingh said the public should resist condemning them for not speaking out sooner.
He said they may be affected by conditions such as Traumatic Bonding or Stockholm Syndrome.
He said traumatic bonding is where the people involved in alleged abusive situations become psychologically bonded or chained to their abusers making them become like a hostage.
And Stockholm syndrome effect is where the victims empathise with their abusers or captors.
Deyalsingh said, “People may say well, why didn’t the children come forward? But you see, if you grow up in a home where you have an omnipotent male present, one who is like a dictator, ruler, or abuser, you tend to be subservient, and we see it in different psychological theories.
“The traumatic bonding theory where if you grow up with licks and abuse and quarrelling and these things, that is all you know. That is how you are parented. These children may have that traumatic bonding where they now think this is how love is. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is the norm. They are conditioned that way. They don’t see the need to get out and report or to call for help because to them this is the norm because they have not been exposed,” Deyalsingh explained.
He added, “Then there’s the Stockholm syndrome effect where if you witness one of your siblings demised at the hands of someone, you might be so fearful that you might suffer the same fate, that you now have a gratification to that individual who would not harm you. You feel grateful for that individual, so in that way you become like a hostage, like a psychological chain that binds you,” he added.