Macabre text messages among a group of a dozen Dutch girls egging each other on to commit suicide has provided a new twist to the well-documented dangers of modern, instant-communication technology for the young.
The revelation by a local newspaper that the group of 12- to 15- year-olds had been texting each other on their phones and computers for months earlier this year has provoked a flood of soul-searching in the Netherlands, a country that is by now inured to reports of Internet sexual grooming and blackmail.
The police were alerted and a team of social workers has been working with the girls, one of whom has been admitted to a psychiatric clinic.
The bizarre network grew up following the suicide last March of a girl at a school in Enschede, a city in the northeastern province of Overijssel on the German border.
Four of her friends had "driven each other completely crazy," school psychologist Frank Rijnders told the Tubantia newspaper, which agreed not to go to press with the tale until the summer holidays were well underway.
"Who dares to?" was a repeated text message.
Staff at the school -- the Stedelijke Lyceum -- spoke of a "suicide virus" which they feared would spread to others once the news broke.
One 14-year-old girl told the national press she had joined in believing it was a joke.
"OK, then I will too," she responded, saying she had done so "for kicks."
When asked when and how she planned to kill herself, the girl broke off the conversation that day but, fascinated, returned to the chat group the next day.
"I realized that many of the girls had problems at home, but I didn't. It got really scary, so that I told my parents, who told the school," the 14-year-old said.
Hermann van Engeland, who lectures in child psychiatry at Utrecht University's medical center, says suicide and talking about it somehow raise status among the young.
"We don't know why," he says, but he thinks it is much like a game of dare.
Several commentators have pointed to an 18th-century parallel, when the publication of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero commits suicide, led to a string of youthful suicides.
The Internet has replaced the romantic novel and the lovelorn letter, and as a Dutch foundation that works with those at risk of suicide has noted, it also provides information on how to commit suicide.
Erik Jan de Wilde, who heads the youth research department of the Social Health Service in Rotterdam, says it is well documented that "one suicide increases the risk of another" within a secondary school.
Schools run specific programs to demystify suicide and to counter the romantic aura that surrounds it for some youngsters.
But he echoes the 14-year-old who brought the messages to light.
"It is never girls that are otherwise happy within themselves. There is always something else going on -- feelings of helplessness, hopelessness," he said.
"The bucket is full and then something apparently trivial -- a fight, a boyfriend who ends a relationship -- can be the last drop," De Wilde said.
The experts agree the problem is not new. Adolescents have always been prone to strong feelings and to radical action, but modern technology allows a situation to get out of hand more quickly.
There is no measured sealing of an envelope and long walk to the post box, during which the writer might have time to reflect.
And the response comes in two minutes, rather than two days, allowing the cycle to begin again almost immediately.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened