With all the main suspects having been taken into custody and being grilled, the Police appear to be on the right path to uncover what transpired at a guest house in Kalutara last weekend which resulted in the death of a 16-year-old schoolgirl in highly questionable circumstances. The million dollar question the public wants answered and the Police are probing is whether she was murdered or whether she took her own life, and many remain hopeful that that information would be revealed soon.

However, as various forms of discourses surrounding this incident, especially on social media platforms, point out, what the Police can find out is limited to what led to the girl’s death, not necessarily what factors created a situation where the deceased did not realise the danger that she was in. The court of public opinion has, unfortunately, been too quick to tell that the girl was in the wrong for allowing herself to be found among people and circumstances that did not value her even at the last minute of her life. In fact, social media discourses show that this incident has taken victim blaming in Sri Lanka to a new, detrimental level.

Alcohol and drug use, being a target of abusers and scammers, getting into sexual relationships with no adequate knowledge about the risks and responsibilities that they involve, and risky experiments – some of which were present in the Kalutara incident – are some of the challenges many teenagers encounter, and are quite prevalent in any country. However, those have remained a part and parcel of any society for a very long time, and the question we should ask ourselves therefore is not whether their existence is acceptable, but how ready our youth is to deal with such challenges prudently.

While the world has taken a more open minded approach to inculcating in the youth the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes and the quality of being responsible in order to ready them for such threats, Sri Lanka has not evolved adequately in that regard. On the matter of children’s upbringing in general, the traditional Sri Lankan society focuses mostly on not exposing children to risks, and worse, hiding the truth about real life risks from children in the hope of protecting children, when in reality, what it leads to is keeping children uninformed about risks to which they are likely to be exposed at some point in their life, especially when they see the world as teenagers. The challenges faced by the introduction of the Hathe Ape Potha (a school textbook on sexual and reproductive health [SRH]) for years, especially from religious leaders who ludicrously believed that teaching about SRH was tantamount to encouraging children to enter into sexual relationships, is a good example that shows why our teenagers learn about sex, intimate relationships and the related responsibilities from unreliable, and sometimes harmful, sources.

This backwardness should be addressed to save the country’s next generation. As tragic as incidents like this are, they are in fact a wake-up call, especially for parents with teenagers, that when children reach an age where they start taking decisions by themselves, they should be ready to take judicious decisions, and that it is largely the parents’ responsibility to ensure that. The sooner that children learn about the everyday threats of society, the better, and it is always better to learn about them from parents as lessons instead of from outsiders as experiences.

At the same time, teenagers’ access to guest houses, which have mushroomed in every city with little to no monitoring by any authority, should be subjected to scrutiny. As has been pointed out by the Police in relation to the Kalutara incident, if a minor who gets their hands on the National Identity Card of an adult can enter a guest house pretending to be that adult, that shows a severe lack of responsibility on the part of guest house operators, and those are also issues that have been brought to light by the Kalutara incident.

Instead of merely lamenting the Kalutara incident, complaining about how decadent the Sri Lankan society is, or bringing to book the offenders in that incident, the authorities should look at the bigger picture. Instead of a tragedy, the Kalutara incident should be a lesson that leads to positive changes in parenting, awareness, vigilance and regulations.