Swift police action followed by an eyewitness call saved the woman’s life
Swift police action followed by an eyewitness call saved the woman’s life
JANUARY 6, 2021 — In an incident of bravado, a woman intending to jump off a bridge was saved by a police officer in the Brazilian municipality of São Paulo.
The police rescue team received a call from a suspicious onlooker who earlier assumed that the woman was putting herself at grave risk unknowingly, by attempting to walk on the precarious parapet.
As seen in the video, after failed attempts of talking her into descending from the 20-meter-high rim, the officers discovered this was the case of a suicide attempt. One of the officers realized there was no time to waste, walked up to the woman and quickly grabbed her, thus pulling her off the rim. The two were set rolling down the road as the eyewitness heaved a sigh of relief.
The officers were congratulated for their bravery and timely intervention, by the police department of São Paulo.
In a report on suicide rates across selected countries around the world, published in November 2019 and based on a survey conducted in 2017, the rate in Brazil stood at an average of six in every 100,000. The suicide rate for women was 2.4, while that for men was 9.9. South Korea reported the highest national average of a staggering 24.6. The rate of suicides among young men (between the age of 25 and 44) has also seen a significant increase of 8.6 percent since 2004.
Furthermore, high-rise bridges are notorious for being suicide hotspots. As per a 2019 report titled ‘Suicide by jumping from high places in a Brazilian city’ by the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry, Brazil witnessed an 86 percent reduction in overall deaths following the erection of barriers for prevention.
There was little evidence of bridges being substituted by other high-rise sites. While taking regional factors into account, the report established the presence of such sites as a risk factor for the growing number of copy-cat acts.
While the rate of reported suicides, especially among women in Brazil, is comparatively low, there is evidence that the public perception of the national average is much higher. As per a 2017 report, published by Ipsos MORI (a global survey organization based in London, UK) on the ‘Difference between the actual percentage of deaths among women aged 15 to 24 that were suicide and what respondents believed as of 2017’, Brazilians believed that 29 percent of the deaths were caused by suicide which in reality stood at 4.3.
(Edited by Prachi Sibal and Vaibhav Vishwanath Pawar)
