Editorial: Are we a civilized society?

"My daughter put up a fight. While she was on the ground, she tried to brace and the knife cut her hand. Someone could have tried to save her.”

Those words from Reverend Dennis Lalla about the murder of his daughter express my thoughts as well as I read the story of the brutal attack on the clergyman’s daughter.

Media reports vary. However what is clear is that the man who attacked Sabrina Lalla-Mitchell at her workplace on Tuesday was able to inflict more than a dozen stab wounds on the woman with no one but her two young sons – aged 10 and 11 – lifting a finger to prevent this savage attack.

It happened in the presence of co-workers at a motor vehicle showroom. The man was acting alone. Why on earth would people watch such and do nothing? If the media reports are correct, the man was armed only with a knife.

What kind a society have we become where we could look the other way when a crime like this is taking place? 

I refuse to believe that noting else could be done under the circumstances.

I was also distressed to read media reports quoting women’s rights advocates as asking "What else could be done?" 

Diana Mahabit-Wyatt, chair of the coalition against domestic violence, is quoted as saying Sabrina took all the precautions she could to protect herself from abuse. Perhaps Sabrina did. That's another issue.

I think the media are asking the wrong questions. This is not about abuse of women. This is about murder and a society that has become selfish and callous.

The real tragedy is that society abdicated its responsibility to protect this woman and today her two children will have to live with that nightmare forever – a nightmare of one man plunging a knife into their mother while they looked in horror with adults refusing to get involved.

Today, I am ashamed to write that we in Trinidad and Tobago are no longer a civilized society if we can stand idly by and let one man take a woman’s life and do nothing.

The issue raised by Mahabir-Wyatt is also a valid one and raises the question about what our society is really doing to protect women from abuse both in the home and in the wider society. But that is for another day.

Jai Parasram | Toronto, 28 October 2010