Police, Internet Providers Try to Deter Online Suicide Pacts

If you enter the Japanese word for “suicide” into Yahoo Japan’s search engine one of the first sites to come up is the “suicide bulletin board.” The front page explains the site’s aims: “This is a bulletin board to discuss suicide,” it reads. “From postings by the suicidal, to discussions about the rights and wrongs of suicide, to suicide prevention, anything is O.K. . . . read the site on your cell phone too.”

Among the ongoing discussion threads is one headed “Why can’t I die?” “When I think about it, I could die at any time, but why don’t I die? I can go so far, but why can’t I take the last step?” Another is titled: “Please teach me about suicide.” The poster writes that he or she is a university student studying suicide. Elsewhere on the list of threads: “Everyone in my class hates me,” writes a young poster. “They talk about me behind my back and ignore me . . . after all, perhaps I should kill myself like they say I should.” One reply further down the thread reads: “It’s the fault of the bullying, not yours. Don’t think about suicide.”

The suicide rate in Japan has long been one of the highest in the world. In 2004, 32,325 people committed suicide — about 20 times the number of people murdered. And in the last few years, there has been a frightening increase in the number of group suicides arranged over the Internet through chat rooms dedicated to discussing suicide.

This April, Kyodo newswire reported a grimly typical case of suspected Internet suicide in which two men and a woman who were found dead in a car in Chichibu, a town in the Tokyo commuter belt. The windows of the car had been sealed from the inside with adhesive tape and three charcoal stoves were found in the car — the victims had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. There have been a series of similar cases. Japan’s National Police Agency reported 75 deaths in suspected Internet-arranged suicides from January to August this year compared with 55 deaths during the whole of 2004.

Dr. Tadashi Takeshima of the National Institute of Mental Health, who helped compile an institute report on Internet-arranged suicide, believes that the Web sites are dangerous because they enable suicide pacts between individuals who might never commit suicide on their own. Once caught up in a group pact, they find they cannot turn back. He says that often the members of the suicide pacts are in their teens or 20s and strangers except for contact through the sites. In other group suicides the victims are normally lovers, friends or at least known to each other, but in these cases police only find a connection when they check the victims’ computers or mobile phones.

Dr. Takeshima’s study group looked at a number of sites to decide whether action against them was needed, but despite their concerns, they stopped short of recommending that sites be shut down. “It’s very difficult to conclude that any one site is harmful,” he said.

Apart from the cathartic benefit for some users in discussing their depression, there are also people who log onto the sites to try and help those considering suicide. Yukiko Nishihara, founder of the Tokyo Branch of Befrienders Worldwide, a suicide prevention organization, says that some of their 60 volunteers monitor the chat rooms, chat with users and post the numbers of the NGO’s suicide helplines.

In mid-2004, Internet providers, police, academics and NGOs began meeting to discuss what action to take about suicide chat rooms and how to prevent suicide pacts. Four groups covering 80 to 90 percent of providers issued guidelines in October 2005 specifying how police and Internet companies will cooperate.

Hiroyuki Kuwako of the Japan Telecom Services Association, one of the groups, says that before the guidelines were set, it was difficult for providers to pass on personal information about suicide chat room users. If a crime is being committed, providers are obliged to hand over information. But even faced with an imminent suicide attempt they feared breaking the law if they passed on names and addresses. “Because suicide isn’t a crime, it’s down to the providers’ judgment whether or not to give out the personal information,” says Kuwako. Even in urgent cases sometimes the providers had to consult with lawyers before notifying the police.

The new guidelines mean that providers can pass on information without fear of violating rules on freedom of expression and privacy, says Yoshikuni Masuyama, deputy director of the National Police Agency Cyber-Crime Division. “I think the guidelines are most useful for the providers,” he says. “Before, because the providers didn’t give out the information, it was said that people were dying needlessly.”

The guidelines use an existing law that lets police request personal information if someone’s life is in danger (for example finding out the address of someone involved in a car accident through their mobile phone company). According to new rules, if the police believe that a Web site user’s life is in danger they will submit a form to the person’s provider. The Internet provider will look at the form and decide whether or not to cooperate with the request.

Kuwako stressed, however, that “providers don’t check the messages. If we did that, it would be a kind of censorship.” Tipping off the police is instead left to chat room users. If anyone believes that a poster is seriously intending to kill themselves they can notify the police who may contact the provider. The system could also used in other situations, say if someone receives an e-mail from an Internet friend, which leads them to believe that person may be about to kill themselves. According to Kuwako, the guidelines were put into action at least twice in the first month.

As well as the guidelines, a suicide-prevention Web site has also been set up by the National Institute of Mental Health. The Web site is called “ikiru” (to live).

Dr. Takeshima says that they began by looking at material on suicide on the Internet. “As we thought, there was a lot of harmful information,” he says. Some sites give detailed instructions about how to commit suicide. “We thought we should use the Internet to try and prevent suicide too,” he said. The NIMH site publishes suicide research, coordinates suicide prevention efforts and gets around 250 hits per day. Although the site monitors do not correspond directly with depressed individuals, some enquiries are directed to telephone help lines and mental health centers.

Another outcome of the study was that media organizations were asked not to publish detailed information about actual sites and methods of suicide – although their advice generally has not been followed so far, said Takeshima. He does not want to give his opinion on whether the media have made the problem worse by publicizing it, though he notes that few cases have been reported in the media recently. “Has the number of Internet suicide cases reduced, or are they continuing but have lost their freshness for the media?” he asked.

In fact, according to the National Police Agency, the number of cases of Internet-arranged suicide has decreased since the guidelines were introduced in October. Takeshima speculates that that may be because Web site users know that their personal information may be passed to the police if they attempt to carry out a suicide pact.

But despite the intense media attention that Internet-arranged suicides have received, the number of such cases is still tiny compared to the number of overall suicides in Japan. In 2004, 6.1 percent fewer people committed suicide than in the previous year but that was still an increase of 50 percent since 1994.The sharpest jump occurred at the end of the 1990s, near the peak of Japan’s recent economic down-turn. Seventy-two percent of people who commit suicide in Japan are men, most of who are in their 50s or 60s – the group hit hardest by the recession.

“The government needs to recognize that suicide is not a personal problem, it is a social problem,” said Yukiko Nishihara of suicide helpline Befrienders Worldwide. “They are good at setting up academic studies of suicide, but [the government] need[s] to cooperate with NGOs.”

And while every effort should be made to prevent Internet-arranged suicide pacts, people should remember that the technology is just a tool, Takeshima said. “In Tokyo, there are a lot of tall buildings, so that is a means of suicide [there]. In the countryside, people use agricultural chemicals . . . The simple reason [why young people arrange group suicide through the Internet] is that young people use the Internet.”

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Comments

  1. well suicide is a problem that afects all modern societies specially on the internet is good to see people suposably so far away but still so well intentioned have fun