Dehumanisation of Society: The Way Forward

Opinion

We should follow SSR’s historical precedent: just as he enlisted world experts to solve past national crises, we urgently require specialists to address social inequality, crime, and rehabilitation

By Sada Reddi

Suggesting that Mauritian society is undergoing dehumanisation may oversimplify the diverse and multiple social problems that citizens are facing today. However, one must accept that the idyllic image of our island is fast vanishing, and there is hardly a village or town left where citizens can feel safe and lead a peaceful life. In the last decades, violence in multiple forms, anxiety, and fear has spread all over the island. Today, no one feels safe in their high-walled houses with anti-burglary doors and windows or security cameras. Even within family circles or close neighbourhoods, increased violence is being perpetrated on a regular basis.

One may be tempted to look for specific factors in every case of aggression but overlook the fact that one fundamental reason was the human consequences of industrialisation in the 1980s. It is well known that the early phase of industrialisation in any country did bring in its wake a number of social problems, and most countries failed to anticipate the social consequences and took a lot of time to put in place structures and mechanisms to mitigate its impact. In our case, we failed to draw lessons from other countries, and there was no social infrastructure to cope with the problems which confronted society at that time.

Generations of children grew up with minimal maternal care because working women, doubly burdened by factory labour and patriarchal expectations, lacked the essential social infrastructure (nursery services) to support them. Many parents had no alternative but to pay for private tuition to leave children to be supervised by tuition teachers until they came back from work around five o’clock. An exhausted mother, plagued by transport problems, could only reach home late, cook a quick meal, and send children to bed, a routine which was repeated over several decades. The fortunate children received care from their grandparents, a crucial support system that was unavailable to children being brought up solely by their parents in nuclear families.

Deprived of parental love and consistent relationships, many children in this situation experienced profound loneliness and suffered significant mental distress. A whole generation grew into adulthood in these conditions, and this cycle was repeated as they too became parents, resulting in the ‘dehumanisation’ of large segments of the population. The pressures and stresses were even worse for children where living and social conditions were precarious. Having grown up accustomed to their parents’ difficult routine, children from middle-class backgrounds who moved overseas for education or employment found no compelling reason to return, as the challenging urban conditions they encountered elsewhere were already familiar.

One should not be surprised that the long-term consequences of social dislocation and deprivation have affected thousands of our children, deprived of human and moral values in various degrees. It would be fair to say that the multiple social problems faced by society these days are the long-term consequences of governmental failures to seriously address these issues over decades. When compelled by pressure, authorities consistently adopted a flawed, reactive approach: assembling experts for quick-fix solutions that, while perhaps adequate in the past, are inappropriate for a rapidly changing society because they fail to examine the problems’ complexity from multiple angles.

At present, different organisations — even with the best intentions — seek to deal with problems in silos, wasting effort by ignoring their interrelated nature and being unwilling to acknowledge the lack of necessary domestic expertise to solve such multi-headed issues. Concurrently, the authorities habitually delegate complex problems to civil servants without verifying their capacity to find solutions.

In many cases, some civil servants simply form a small team, collect limited data, copy and paste reports from other countries, and hatch a report. The authorities then proudly announce this document, which appears on the front page of our papers, and expect other civil servants to implement the recommendations after a few brief workshops. The net result is that nothing changes: problems have worsened, and this deeply flawed process will persist regardless of any change in government. All stakeholders remain satisfied with their efforts, oblivious to the fact that the core problem remains fundamentally unsolved.

It is easy but completely futile to merely list the causes of the present social dislocation, as this approach prevents us from understanding our situation. We would simply identify the symptoms and not the root causes, and any resulting solutions would miss the mark.

Take, for example, the problems facing many schools: bullying, violence, drugs, indiscipline, peer pressure, sexual behaviour, friendship issues, mental health, and examination pressure. Do we really think that a civic education programme, without a proper study of our schools and the wider environment and the collaboration of experts in these fields, would yield durable solutions? We would simply be paying lip service to the problems. What applies to our schools also applies to other institutions.

What is required is multi-disciplinary teams with expertise in various fields to make a comprehensive social analysis of our society, collecting quantitative data supplemented by interviews and other qualitative research. Only then can we rank the problems in terms of importance, draw up a list of priorities and solutions, and secure the necessary human and financial resources for short and long-term implementation. Experts such as social scientists, sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists should be enlisted in these teams if we are truly serious about finding durable solutions.

In the past, when we faced problems of overpopulation, poverty, and other economic issues, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam did not hesitate to enlist world experts on population, social security, and economy to study our situation. What we need now is a report by a team of specialists in the fields of social inequality, crime, and rehabilitation. If we do not possess such expertise in Mauritius, the Prime Minister can secure resources from the London School of Economics, Britain’s Labour government, or other institutions. This, in my view, is the only way forward to saving our young people.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 17 October 2025