00:00Psychiatrist and former independent senator Dr. Varma Dialsing, who has spent years examining
00:06youth behavior, trauma and family dynamics, tells The Morning Edition, children are among
00:12society's most vulnerable and precious assets and must be carefully protected.
00:18However, he warns that a dangerous normalization of deviance has increasingly been taking root
00:24across society, with behaviors once viewed as unacceptable, now becoming commonplace.
00:3199% of the time, a child could wonder if nothing happened. And now you think that is normal.
00:37You think that nothing will happen. And that normalization and deviance is something we have
00:42to tell persons. And not just for children, you know, for your own sake. You know, sometimes you
00:46may be driving fast 99% of the time until 1% something happened.
00:51Dr. Dialsing says, while incidents like these often trigger public outrage, blame and speculation,
00:59attacking and publicly shaming grieving relatives, online attacks serve no constructive purpose
01:05and only deepen trauma for families already facing unimaginable pain.
01:12So sometimes you see that public shaming, that can happen, but we have to be very, very cautious
01:16what persons are putting out on social media. If you have social humiliation, that could cause
01:24problems to the mother who is also grieving and having her problems to deal with the death
01:29of the child.
01:30The former independent senator shares a past personal experience when his own son was at
01:37the tender age of two.
01:38Our place was secure. But there was a place in the drain about two feet by two feet where the
01:44water goes out. He crawled through that and ended up in the road. Now, all my property
01:50was that nobody would have expected this child to go there. So they had to stop and blow the
01:53horn. So even we have to look at our place and see how we could best as possible
02:01proof it, child proof it.
02:02While maintaining that parents and guardians cannot escape responsibility when it comes to
02:07child safety, Dr. Diyal Singh says any response or penalty should ultimately encourage broader
02:14public education rather than simply punishment alone.
02:18The concept of therapeutic jurisprudence is really where if you have to get punishment, you
02:25do punishment where that child or that mother, that mother or that father now could go out in
02:30society and educate other persons about safety around water, about going in school. So sometimes
02:38the punishment sometimes may be because sometimes you have to have empathy, you have to have
02:42compassion, but you also have responsibility.
02:45Nicole M. Romany, TV6 News.
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