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Psychological consequences

Denial and recurrence are in the acceptance process of relatives living through a disappearance. There is no universal way of mourning and coping with grief. However, a recurrent patter is suppression, even denial of that happened, on the one hand and recurrence of what happened on the other hand. Once the mourning process has been committed successfully a balance between both comes into being. Recurrence and denial are then controlled by the will power of the individual: you can think of what happened, but you can also prefer not to do so. To know more about the psychological consequences and support, visit the Psychosocial Support area.

Material consequences

A disappearance usually has drastic consequences for the relatives in a material way. Once the breadwinner disappears, the other parent is to try to provide for the family. In some countries this process is specially difficult because:

  1. Employers consider the relatives of disappeared person as accomplices of 'terrorists' and prefer not to employ them. 
  2. The remaining parent spends so much time looking for a disappeared partner that it weighs down on the children and results in neglect. In these  situations a committee of relatives may provide tremendous support to the relatives.
  3. Impossibility for the wives to lay a claim on their dowries which are given to them by their own families, without a death certificate of the disappeared husband. This problem is well known in various Asian countries where dowries are a common phenomenon in rural areas.
  4. Women are not allowed to remarry as long as it is not certain that their husbands are dead.

Social consequences

The social consequences vary per culture. In some countries it is no more than normal for the environment to support the remaining relatives. In other countries however, the relatives of disappeared persons are considered outcasts of the community since it is generally assumed that the disappeared person has actually done something wrong which justifies the disappearance.