In Time of Lockdown: Reflections on Locks, Lockdown, Isolation

The Isolation of the Unidentified Charlotte Jordan (DA Sh) When wars and natural disasters strike, thousands are left in isolation – either through loss of identity as an unidentified corpse or by grieving a loved one whose fate is unknown. The dead are isolated from every aspect of their past that made them unique and their families are forced to find closure without a body to mourn, isolating them from traditional practices. DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) is crucial in breaking their isolation by reuniting the dead with their identities and allowing their remains to be returned to their families, who can finally know what happened to them and can lay them to rest. The dead have everything else taken from them; nothing should be able to deprive them of their identity.

DVI in the UK started in response to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. When reports came from Thailand of the devastation, forensic experts all over the country expected to be sent to help the repatriation of unidentified British bodies, but after weeks of waiting the only people who were sent out were some fingerprinting officers from the Metropolitan Police. Professor Sue Black OBE, an anatomist and forensic anthropologist, wrote a letter to her MP voicing her concerns about the lack of DVI response capabilities. Her letter was leaked to the press and it led to a meeting to discuss the DVI response of the UK. By the end of this meeting, everyone was in agreement that a DVI response plan was needed, not as a matter of if, but when. This new-found focus on developments in DVI has enabled the UK to offer the support of trained experts when disaster strikes, not only to repatriate our own dead, but to ensure that the dead of any nation aren’t forgotten in times of crisis and can be returned – not only to their country, but to their family and their identity.

The University of Dundee, where Professor Sue Black works, started a DVI training programme in 2007. It was the first of its kind. Here, officers learnt the proper procedure for identifying a body so they could be effective in times of crisis. When a family contacts the emergency telephone number and says that they think their loved one was involved in a disaster, they are given a priority category based on the likelihood that they were actually involved in the disaster (i.e. someone who was known to be staying in a destroyed region would be prioritised over a traveller who may have already left the country). These categories allow the police to cope with thousands of dead bodies and tens of thousands of requests from anxious families. In the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami 22,000 British citizens were reported, yet the death toll for Britain was 149, so the categories are crucial in allowing people’s true identities to be found. A family liaison officer with DVI training will then interview the family and friends of a high priority person and gather as much information about them that will help to identify the body (i.e. hair colour, tattoos etc.). They also take DNA samples from close relatives so a potential match can be confirmed. This information is then written on a yellow AM (ante-mortem) card. The same information is also taken from recovered bodies and written on pink PM (post-mortem) cards. These cards are then sent to the matching centre where the information on both is carefully checked to ensure the matches are accurate. A hasty match would deprive two families of their loved ones.

An example of this is the heart-breaking story of a man and his family in the Kosovo Massacre. During the war with the Serbians, most Kosovo Albanians tried to stay out of towns when they could to avoid the Serbian forces. In March 1999, a family was travelling into a town from the countryside to pick up supplies. The father was driving the tractor and his wife, her sister, their mother and his eight children were on a wooden trailer behind him. Suddenly, the trailer was struck by a RPG launched from the hillside. Everyone apart from the father was killed. His youngest child was a baby and the eldest were fourteen-year-old twin boys. As the father clambered off the tractor, a sniper shot him in the leg. He was able to pull himself into the undergrowth and tie his belt around his leg to stem the bleeding. There he waited until he thought it was safe to re-emerge to find what was left of his family. He knew if he didn’t bury them, they would be eaten by hounds. Only the baby’s body hadn’t been fragmented by the blast. He was only able to locate the right side of his wife and the bottom half of his twelve-year-old daughter. He buried what he could find of them under a tree. Over a year later the site was identified as an indictment site for the case being built against Slobodan Milosevic and his officers, as the slaughter of an entire family couldn’t be justified as an act of war. The man took the investigators to the tree where he had buried his family as he wanted justice for them and for families like his, and because he was worried that his God wouldn’t be able to differentiate between them in this mass grave to find their souls. He couldn’t be at 39