Paramasivan Kandaswamy, Subramani Brinda, Sudarsanam Nandan
Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-corruption, Government of Tamil Nadu, Chennai, India.
Tamil Nadu Police Department, Government of Tamil Nadu, Chennai, India.
Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2022;9(1):408. doi: 10.1057/s41599-022-01426-8. Epub 2022 Nov 12.
The primary duty of law enforcement agencies is to ensure that a victim has the necessary information and access to the relevant tools required to seek justice. In India, complex cases such as bodily offences and property crimes capture the work and efforts of many agencies involved; however, cases related to missing persons are not often accorded similar priority or seriousness. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have added further challenges to this scenario. The government-mandated lockdowns in Tamil Nadu generally exacerbated difficult socio-economic and living conditions, thereby directly or indirectly contributing to an increased load of missing person cases. This study aims to assess and identify the impact of mobility on reporting and registration of missing persons. By adopting an auto-regressive neural networks method, this study uses a counterfactual analysis of registered missing person cases during the government-mandated lockdowns in response to the global pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The registered cases are calculated based on the daily count of cases for eleven years in Tamil Nadu, India. The lockdowns identify eight different time windows to determine the impact of mobility on the registration of cases. While there has been no significant or drastic change over the pre-pandemic period, during the pandemic, especially during the restrictive phases of the pandemic, there was a sharp fall in cases compared to the counterfactual predicted (effect sizes: -0.981 and -0.74 in 2020 and 2021), signalling towards a choked mechanism of reporting. In contrast, when most mobility restrictions were removed, an increase in cases (effect sizes of +0.931 and 0.834 in 2020 and 2021) pointed to restored and enabled reporting channels. The research findings emphasise the significance of mobility as a factor in influencing the reporting and registration of missing persons and the need to ensure this continues to help families find redress.
执法机构的首要职责是确保受害者掌握寻求正义所需的必要信息，并能够使用相关工具。在印度，诸如身体伤害犯罪和财产犯罪等复杂案件占据了许多相关机构的工作和精力；然而，与失踪人员相关的案件却往往没有得到类似的重视或严肃对待。新冠疫情及其后的封锁措施给这种情况带来了更多挑战。泰米尔纳德邦政府下令实施的封锁总体上加剧了艰难的社会经济和生活条件，从而直接或间接地导致失踪人员案件数量增加。本研究旨在评估和确定流动性对失踪人员报告和登记的影响。通过采用自回归神经网络方法，本研究对2020年和2021年应对全球疫情期间政府下令实施封锁期间登记的失踪人员案件进行了反事实分析。登记的案件是根据印度泰米尔纳德邦11年的每日案件计数计算得出的。封锁确定了八个不同的时间窗口，以确定流动性对案件登记的影响。虽然与疫情前时期相比没有显著或剧烈的变化，但在疫情期间，尤其是在疫情的限制阶段，与反事实预测相比，案件数量急剧下降（2020年和2021年的效应大小分别为-0.981和-0.74），这表明报告机制出现了堵塞。相比之下，当大多数流动性限制解除后，案件数量增加（2020年和2021年的效应大小分别为+0.931和0.834），这表明报告渠道得到了恢复和畅通。研究结果强调了流动性作为影响失踪人员报告和登记的一个因素的重要性，以及确保其继续帮助家庭获得补救的必要性。
