Santo Domingo. – The Joint Task Force has begun coordinated work to prioritize mental health care, which the Government considers a social and security debt, exacerbated worldwide. This effort involves the Ministry of Health, the National Police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of Women, and other agencies.
The Minister of Interior and Police, Faride Raful, offered the information at the conclusion of the 104th follow-up meeting on the Citizen Security Plan, headed by the President of the Republic Luis Abinader, and which was attended by the Minister of Public Health Víctor Elías Atallah.
The official specified that mental health ceased to be a priority many years ago, and warned that the Dominican Republic today faces an enormous social debt in the creation of accessible spaces for preventive care.
“We are also resuming articulated initiatives, because despite this, a health issue is a security issue, protection for minors, vulnerable sectors, the elderly, women, mothers who are silent victims of abuse that is sometimes not detectable, because they do not represent physical abuse and that end up and trigger that,” he explained.
Raful maintained that this scourge is evident in the recent cases that have shaken the country. Furthermore, he emphasized that the effects of the pandemic have translated into a worsening of mental health conditions, both globally and locally, making it more urgent to reinforce a response to the issue.
Raful lamented all the mistreatment recorded against minors in recent days, for which he reiterated his call to society to collaborate in a task that must involve the media, neighborhood associations and churches, to “make a committed and truly genuine journey to be able to help each other.”
“We are very moved, very concerned, and we understand that national public policy needs more economic resources, more technology, and, of course, more personnel to be able to do preventive work and that these cases do not end in this outcome,” he stated.
Regarding the accumulated homicide rate, he detailed that it is at 8.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to National Police data reported up to Friday, August 22, which represents a downward trend, with 25 provinces remaining in a single digit.
There are 52 fewer fatalities so far in 2025, as 852 have been recorded to date, while, for the same time in 2024, the cumulative figure reached 904, and in 2023 it was 993.
Raful clarified that the statistics for each death respond to its nature, and explained that the National Statistics Office (ONE) is fed by the data provided by the National Police to the system, where they are segmented after their analysis at the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (Inacif). He added that when the cases are the result of legal action, that is, involving the law enforcement institution, an investigation is also carried out.
“There are deaths that are not included in the homicide rates, because they are deaths in legitimate self-defense, or they are accidental deaths, which when the data is disaggregated are not homicides caused by social conflict, much less by crime, and they may be putting the complete data of all the dead”, he said.
