Johannesburg - Dr Kathryn Smith, an interdisciplinary visual and forensic artist and chairperson of the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University, says an estimated 7 000, but likely closer to 10 000, unidentified bodies in South Africa’s medico-legal laboratories are waiting to be identified each year.
Smith says statistics are kept on unclaimed bodies, but not all unclaimed bodies are unidentified.
“And in the absence of a single database where information on missing and unidentified people in South Africa can be easily compared, and in a context where there is just one forensic pathologist for every million people, the extent of this ‘silent mass disaster’ cannot be accurately quantified,” said Smith.
Smith says that for skeletal remains, a facial reconstruction might be the only opportunity to attempt to identify an unknown person, but reconstructing a face from the skull is labour-intensive and time-consuming and may require expert cleaning prior to anthropological analysis and reconstruction.
Smith also says that while the skull reveals an enormous amount about face and feature shape, other critical visual information about someone’s physical appearance, such as skin tone and texture, eye colour, hair colour, length and texture, and body mass, cannot be inferred from the skull alone.
“So, if sufficient facial information is present to infer a living appearance, even with facial trauma, it is possible to digitally adjust a post-mortem photograph to restore a plausible and acceptable living appearance. This is much quicker and more reliable than reconstructing a face from a skull,” adds Smith.
She says there needs to be training for forensic officers in post-mortem facial photography as a cost-effective intervention.
“The work of forensic humanitarian initiatives identifying the disappeared and those seeking a better life who perish trying to cross international borders is showing that secondary identifiers such as clothing, personal effects and facial imaging are perhaps more useful in complex and low-resourced contexts such as ours. This will assist in criminal and social justice. So, as an artist-scientist who wants to be useful, this is my focus.”
Smith urges thinking “creatively and collaboratively about how to do forensic identification in our unique context”.
“We can’t always rely on the methods accepted as scientific and primary, being fingerprints, DNA and dental. DNA is expensive, and most South Africans don’t receive regular dental care, so comparative records don’t exist in most cases. We need African solutions for African problems.”
The Star