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A call for social conscience
By DONNA YAWCHING
IN NOVEMBER it was rape; in February it's suicide.
Flavour-of-the-month. Two children who had probably never even heard of Romeo and Juliet
nevertheless staged a local replay; and that, apparently, got the ball rolling.
All of a sudden, every lovelorn or pissed-off teenager is suddenly eyeing the bedsheets
and scoping out the rafters. Not to be outdone, the Gramoxone brigade is on the march as
well, it would seem.
Even the oldsters are starting to get in on the act: Thursday's newspaper reported a
60-year-old man hanging himself. And, of course, as I write this, the latest casualty is
well-known TV personality Vaughn Salandy
What the hell is going on here?
Suicide, of course, is nothing new; and even the occasional child suicide is not unknown.
All suicides, however, are not equal: a difference must be acknowledged between the
self-inflicted death of a melancholy 60-year-old stroke victim who has lost both wife and
son in recent years, and that of a 14-year-old suffering from what I can only describe as
romantic hysteria.
The former is old enough to know what he is doing, and, presumably, to have his reasons
for doing it (the same can be said of Vaughn Salandy); the latter is a child who cannot
possibly have any idea of the enormity of her act. What does "forever" mean to a
14-, or 16-, or even 18-year-old?
Worthy of notice is the utter absence, so far, of professional evaluation regarding the
recent suicide epidemic. One would have expected the sociologists and psychologists to be
crowding into the limelight, trying to explain why these tragedies are happening; and why
to individuals so young. Surely the signals point to something being amiss on more than
just the personal level-a problem more complex than merely "acute depression"
due to troubled love affairs, as Prof Ramesh Deosaran (renowned, I believe, as a crime
specialist) has recently postulated.
The truth, of course, is that everyone is afraid of voicing aloud what no one can possibly
have failed to notice: that all of these youthful tragedies are taking place in
working-class Indian households.
Neither love affairs nor depression are exclusive to any particular social or ethnic
grouping: is there, then, some other component that is causing this sudden spate, a
"missing link" in the chain of cause and effect?
Could it have anything to do with the clash of traditional values in a post-modern
society, for example? An inability of both sides to communicate? A general devaluation of
children's emotional needs, both in this particular community and in the wider society?
Who knows? This much is certain: without serious evaluation of the problem, and the
proposal of determined counter-measures, the phenomenon is unlikely to go away. It may go
underground for a while, but it is certain to re-surface sooner or later.
While these are questions for the sociologists and psychologists to debate (and I pretend
to be neither), there is another aspect of this child-suicide surge that troubles me
deeply: the copycat effect.
By this, I don't mean the vacuous declaration on the part of one of the young victim's
relatives that the boy "used to copy what other people do". I refuse to believe
that a 16-year-old would commit suicide just because everyone else is doing it, and he
wanted to see what it felt like. That comment alone could be viewed as an indication of
what was wrong in that particular family.
What bothers me is the copycat effect on a deeper level: the level on which a desperately
unhappy person, on learning that some other desperately unhappy person has found the
courage to take this particular way out, decides that maybe death isn't such a bad option
after all; and takes the leap too. "After all," such reasoning might go,
"if a 14-year-old can go through with it, surely I can as well." And the tragedy
self-perpetuates.
Which brings us to the very sensitive issue of the media's role in this whole mess. I am,
of course, 100 per cent against censorship-well, let's say 98 per cent, since I could make
a very good case for censoring violent and child pornography.
I would be the absolute last person to join Messieurs Panday and Duprey in advocating that
the press should be made to shut up about anything they don't like to see in the news. If
crime and corruption are what's happening out there, it's the media's job to emblazon it
on the front page; I'll always believe that.
But suicide is a different thing altogether. It is worth noting that in many countries the
big-city newspapers have arrived, voluntarily, at a consensus that suicides, by and large,
should not be reported. No doubt there's the occasional exception: a well-known figure, or
a spectacularly un-ignorable case.
But the run-of-the-mill hangings and wrist-slashings and drinkings of poison, and most
definitely the leaps in front of subway trains: these are never reported. Because long
ago, their psychologists recognised the power of the copycat effect, and persuaded the
media that it was their social duty not to contribute to these tragedies. Or perhaps the
media persuaded themselves.
That's not censorship, that's restraint: a distinction which, it would seem, our society
still has difficulty making. In T&T, the concept of editorial self-restraint would in
itself be considered virtual suicide: which newspaper would risk giving its competitors
the edge by not reporting such a circulation booster as a double teen-suicide? Not to
mention the subsequent trend?
That's understandable; but not defensible. Someone has to make the first responsible move.
I would love it to be the Express, which already has had the stalwart courage not
to publish Thackoor Boodram's decapitated head. We're No.1 in circulation; could we not
also be No 1 in social conscience?
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