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Teenagers speak out on multiple suicide deaths

Several teenagers spoke out yesterday against parents who take their children’s lives while committing suicide and pleaded with adults to think twice before doing so.

“Every person is an individual, no one has the right to take other people’s lives,” 16-year-old Yeh Cheng-yu (葉晟宇) told a news conference held by the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families (TFCF). “By taking your child’s life, you may have murdered the next Bill Gates or [Albert] Einstein.”

“Everyone wants to be loved and respected,” 15-year-old Chang Yu-wen (張羽玟) said, sobbing. “Yet, so many children are beaten, abused, deserted, murdered or killed as their parents commit suicide.”

Thirteen-year-old Lu Wan-lin (路萬霖) accused such parents of being selfish and “only using their children as a tool to threaten each other when they fight.”

The organization’s figures for this year, up until the end of last month showed that the media has reported 39 cases of parents killing or attempting to kill their children as they committed suicide. This led to the death of 21 children while 36 others were injured.

“What really concerns us is that the number of cases has increased nearly three times since 2004 [when there were 14 cases] and there are still two months left until the end of the year,” TFCF social work department head Paul Shiao (蕭琮琦) said.

Reports showed that these kind of suicide cases happen in two-parent families, single-parent families and families with an immigrant mother, Shiao said.

“The top three reasons why parents acted as they did were economic pressure, conflict in the family or a combination of both,” he said.

While agreeing with the TFCF’s campaign to raise public awareness on children’s rights, to initiate a community high-risk family support network and to make better marriage consulting services available, National Taiwan University’s social work professor Cheng Li-chen (鄭麗珍) believed that it would take more to resolve the issue.

“If we really want to stop [parents taking their children’s lives while committing suicide] we should all ponder some questions,” Cheng said. “Is our society supportive to [high-risk] families with children? If so, how come they could only try to resolve their problems by death?”

Cheng suggested that the social welfare system alone was not sufficient to build a complete high-risk family support network.

“We should involve the education system by providing teachers with the training to sense that there may be something wrong in a student’s family. We should involve the health system and make our doctors and nurses raise the alarm about children who may be abuse victims,” she said.

“We also need to involve our financial authorities to see what we can do to help economically disadvantaged families that are seriously indebted,” Cheng said.
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