Identifying child victims of the South-East Asia Tsunami in Thailand

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal difficulties associated with identifying child victims of the 2004 South-East Asia Tsunami at the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) operation in Phuket and explores two strategies that increased child identifications. Design/methodology/approach Data allowing comparison of identification proportions between adult and child (defined as ⩽16 years old) victims of six nationalities and the forensic methods used to establish identification were used in this study. Findings The first 100 days of the operation revealed that the proportion of adult identifications far outweighed the proportion of child identifications. Moreover, the younger the child, the longer the identification process took (p Originality/value The implementation of these two strategies at the TTVI helped to overcome initial complexities, namely, the lack of ante-mortem and PM material, and increased child identifications.