Lesser availability of corrosive substances could decrease the rate of suicide attempts and corrosive attacks over time
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Lesser availability of corrosive substances could decrease the rate of suicide attempts and corrosive attacks over time Danica Cvetković 1 & Vladimir Živković 1 & Slobodan Nikolić 1 Accepted: 12 May 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
In a recent editorial and a previous paper, Byard stated that the incidence of “acid attacks” and the ingestion of corrosive substances in suicide attempts display marked geographic/cultural variation [1, 2]. We would like to add an observation that these variations also change over time. A few decades ago, suicide attempts and attacks with corrosive substances were common in Serbia, while, nowadays, they are rare. Between 1919 and 1928, in Belgrade, the capital city, 510 cases of suicide were recorded and, among them, 192 (38%) were suicides with corrosives. This method was more popular among women: there were 157 cases out of 225 involving women and only 35 out of 285 cases involving men, meaning that 70% of women who committed suicide used corrosive substances [3]. The most commonly used substance was sodium hydroxide, i.e. lye [3, 4]. At that time, lye was easily obtainable: it was cheap and used in towns for cleaning houses and public buildings, while in the countryside it was mostly used for making soap – animal fat was treated with lye, resulting in the formation of fatty acid salts, i.e. “hard soap” [3]. The typical suicide victim that used this method was an unhappily married young housewife [3]. In the following years, this kind of suicide showed similar trends and percentages, although accidental poisoning with corrosives was also quite common (about one third of all corrosive poisoning cases) [4]. Homicides were rare [4, 5]. According to Professor Milovanović, such a high rate of suicides with corrosives at the time among females might be explained by imitative behavior and the replication of a “popular” method of suicide, but also by the wide accessibility of corrosive substances [3]. Nowadays, in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the victims of “acid attacks” are mostly young women who have refused marriage proposals or sexual advances: these morbid attacks
* Slobodan Nikolić [email protected]; [email protected] 1
School of Medicine, Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Belgrade, 31a Deligradska str., Belgrade 11000, Serbia
are gender-based crimes associated with perceived relationships, marriages or dowry issues [1, 6]. Thus, the typical attacker is male. After the WWII, in Serbia, there were also “corrosive attacks”, however, the attackers were deceived spouses and the victims were their husbands’ mistresses. Usually, a woman would throw lye into a victim’s face, with the intention of blinding her. The message of the cheated wife to her female rival was: “If I cannot see him, you will not see him either!” After the WWII, the newly-appointed communist authorities banned the public sale of corrosive substances, particularly lye, which resulted in a drastic fall in the number of cor
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