Amother was late last week taken into custody by the police in Lagos State for purportedly attempting to kill her sick daughter by administering the poisonous insecticide known as ‘Sniper’ on her. The police said she was arrested for investigation after bringing the one-year-and-seven-month-old baby for treatment at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi-Araba, Lagos, and disclosing to a doctor what she had used on her to calm her excessive convulsions.
Lagos State Police Command spokesman, Benjamin Hundeyin, a Superintendent of Police, was reported saying the woman was arrested after LUTH referred the matter to the security agency last Friday. He told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the chief security officer at the hospital reported to the police that the mother brought the baby in to the hospital for treatment and told a doctor that she gave her ‘Sniper’ to drink when her convulsion was not abating. “The mother said she gave the liquid to her child so she could rest from her excessive convulsions,” Hundeyin said, adding: “Detectives were immediately dispatched to the hospital where they met the baby receiving treatment. The mother has been taken in for investigation after the child had received treatment.”
The police’s response to the case of this woman smacks of stock and insensitive dealing in justice, if that is assumed to be the objective. The woman on her own brought the baby to hospital for medicare, not that the baby was rescued from her deadly clutches at home, or that she ran away and abandoned the baby after administering the poisonous substance. She also on her own disclosed to the doctor what she had done, apparently to guide LUTH medical personnel on what treatment to be applied on the baby. How all these added up to an attempt to end the baby’s life for which the woman was arrested by the police begs logic. It seems possible that the woman sought to relieve the baby of her convulsive syndrome, but applied an obnoxious remedy either out of sheer ignorance, confused agitation or a questionable state of mind. Whichever it was, none equates to hideous premeditation of seeking to end the baby’s life, and thank goodness it did not result in that.
People familiar with natal matters spoke of how some women could suffer from post-partum depression, which may render them cloudy minded for a long while after childbirth. This state of mind is an underlying condition of mental imbalance that could be akin to temporary insanity. Interestingly, nothing was mentioned in the case of this woman about the father of her baby, suggesting that she had the convulsive state of the child to contend with all by herself. It is conceivable how desperate she might have gotten in the bid to calm the child, hence her recourse to a remedy that was worse than the ailment for which remedy was sought. A quick lesson to learn here is that it is irremediably a misadventure to self-medicate where help should be sought from people trained to handle health challenges.
Having said that, we think that the response of the police in arresting this woman for interrogation rather than offering her medical help, which may be what she really needs, betrays the underdevelopment of our justice system. In other words, the woman may be a sick patient profiled as a likely criminal – with the negative societal perception associated with such profiling. The police need expertise in humanising justice, including having specialists in human psychology, gynaecological and child health issues, among others, that may come handy in dealing with cases like the one in reference. Where relevant departments already exist within the police system, the personnel of those departments should be put to work on cases that appear to go beyond criminal intent, which is the core area of criminal detectives.
We hope and pray that the poisoned baby is nursed back to full health soonest. But we also recommend that the embattled mother be taken for medical examination prior to being consigned to criminal investigation and subsequent prosecution. She may need a doctor more than she needs the judge.
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