Police not up to the mark for reports of violence, sadly

Re: "Gender Inequality of today", Editorial, March 7.

I fully agree with the need and the contents of your editorial. Finally, the level of civilisation and general decency of a nation can to a great extent be derived from the way it treats the physically weaker portion of its people, namely its women, children and elderly.

However, sorry to say, I find the advice to report occurrences of violence against women to the police not yet very realistic. Although there luckily are some concerned female officers on the force, most of the time there are none around and the male officers often don't care much. There is a lot of work left to be done with the Thai police force in order to bring it to a level of understanding of this crucial issue similar to the English or German forces.

And a related issue is the alarming number of women with children in Thailand who have been abandoned by the children's fathers without any contribution to the cost of bringing up these children.

But in particular now, with a bright female PM in charge of Thailand, the time has come to increase the sensibility of the population in general and the police force in particular to these issues.

Peter Kramer

Bangkok