RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Get pro­fes­sion­al help be­fore it’s too late!

This was the ad­vice giv­en by Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob yes­ter­day, as he lament­ed how the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice is now be­ing bom­bard­ed with nu­mer­ous do­mes­tic re­ports.

His com­ments came two days af­ter pri­ma­ry school teacher Amar De­o­bar­ran chopped his wife Omatie to death at their South Oropouche Trace, Bar­rack­pore home and then took his own life.

In late Feb­ru­ary, an­oth­er Bar­rack­pore man, David Sookram, chopped his 30-year-old wife, Vashti Suraj-Sook­ram, then com­mit­ted sui­cide.

Ja­cob, in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, said the po­lice have been in­un­dat­ed with do­mes­tic re­ports.

“Do­mes­tic vi­o­lence and these fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tions have been oc­cur­ring over and over and I have been mak­ing the plea for peo­ple to get the right ad­vice and sup­port when they recog­nise there are chal­lenges in re­la­tion­ships and with­in homes,” Ja­cob said.

He al­so spoke about the dou­ble sui­cide of Steve Jug­mo­han and Shar­lene Ramkissoon, who hanged them­selves two weeks ago be­cause of mount­ing fi­nan­cial debts.

 “Last week, I vis­it­ed the home of a fam­i­ly in St Charles vil­lage where we had the dou­ble sui­cide. We have had mur­ders and sui­cides and oth­er mat­ters in­volv­ing fam­i­ly and re­la­tion­ships. Some of us who are el­ders, priests, imams and oth­er per­sons in so­ci­ety go in the di­rec­tion of giv­ing ad­vice. But some­times the ad­vice is tra­di­tion­al and is not in con­gru­ence with the think­ing of youths to­day,” Ja­cob said.

Asked to elab­o­rate, Ja­cob said some­times, peo­ple are ad­vised to stay in abu­sive re­la­tion­ships for the sake of chil­dren or to keep abuse se­cret so that the fam­i­ly rep­u­ta­tion is not af­fect­ed.

“Don’t re­ly on the tra­di­tion­al think­ing. You might be a priest or imam and peo­ple come to you for ad­vice. You should do some train­ing and get to un­der­stand how to do me­di­a­tion and coun­selling,” Ja­cob said.

 He not­ed that fam­i­lies must get pro­fes­sion­al help when they re­alise that do­mes­tic prob­lems are get­ting worse.

“Seek out the pro­fes­sion­al peo­ple who are trained in coun­selling and so­cial work, the psy­chi­a­trist and psy­chol­o­gists who can as­sist,” he added.

Ja­cobs said the TTPS Spe­cial Vic­tims Unit has been hir­ing civil­ian staff to as­sist due to the rise in do­mes­tic prob­lems.

“When things are iden­ti­fied we can go and as­sist but it’s on­ly so much we can do,” he lament­ed,

He not­ed that 140 mur­ders per year are the di­rect re­sult of al­ter­ca­tions and 50 per cent are be­cause of in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship vi­o­lence. 

“We have a prob­lem and we need to deal with it. Fo­cus­ing on the gang sit­u­a­tion will not help at all. We have some­thing in­her­ent­ly wrong in so­ci­ety. We are con­stant­ly ask­ing peo­ple to come on board. We have se­ri­ous chal­lenges in com­mu­ni­ties and with­in fam­i­lies,” Ja­cod ad­mit­ted.

Ja­cob said the peo­ple with­in a com­mu­ni­ty al­so play a valu­able role in re­port­ing abuse and do­mes­tic prob­lems. He could not give ex­act sta­tis­tics but said mi­nor do­mes­tic re­ports and squab­bles be­tween neigh­bours were “nu­mer­ous.”

“Eighty-five per cent of re­ports we at­tend to are mi­nor re­ports and that’s why we ap­pre­ci­ate the group of at­tor­neys who are go­ing from com­mu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­ty to deal with mi­nor mat­ters. It takes a lot from po­lice to deal with these re­ports,” Ja­cob said.

He said the me­di­a­tion cen­tre at St Joseph Po­lice Youth Club was cur­rent­ly do­ing an ex­cel­lent job, but added, “We need to do more in or­der to help.”

Ja­cob said the po­lice, through its le­gal de­part­ment, is al­so train­ing po­lice of­fi­cers to legal­ly deal with qua­si-civ­il mat­ters. He said train­ing for such re­ports will al­so be in­tro­duced at the Po­lice Train­ing Acad­e­my so of­fi­cers are bet­ter able to deal with these re­ports.