Identifying child victims of the South-East Asia Tsunami in Thailand

The purpose of this paper is to reveal difficulties associated with identifying child victims of the 2004 South-East Asia Tsunami at the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) operation in Phuket and explores two strategies that increased child identifications.

Data allowing comparison of identification proportions between adult and child (defined as ⩽16 years old) victims of six nationalities and the forensic methods used to establish identification were used in this study.

The first 100 days of the operation revealed that the proportion of adult identifications far outweighed the proportion of child identifications. Moreover, the younger the child, the longer the identification process took (p<0.0001). Children under the age of 1 year took an average of 195 days to identify compared to 130 days for children aged 16. Identification was extended, on average, 4.3 days for each year that victims younger were than 16. Identifying large numbers of child victims requires targeted protocols. Two efforts increased child identifications for the TTVI operation: using body length to distinguish post-mortem (PM) DNA samples potentially belonging to children for targeted testing, and singling out deceased parents of missing children who were previously identified by a modality other than DNA, in order to retrieve and test their PM samples as references for kinship matching. Disaster victim identification operations with similar characteristics may benefit from implementing a strategy targeting child identifications.

The implementation of these two strategies at the TTVI helped to overcome initial complexities, namely, the lack of ante-mortem and PM material, and increased child identifications.