Blaming women for men's suicide

On The conversation there is an article about this subject. It starts with this case in Australia
“Jennifer Morant, 56, died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her car in November 2014. Last month, a jury found her husband, Graham Morant, 69, guilty of two crimes under section 311 of Queensland’s Criminal Code Act 1889: counselling her to commit suicide, and aiding her to do so. He had repeatedly encouraged Jennifer to commit suicide (counselling), and had even driven her to a hardware store to purchase the equipment she used to kill herself (aiding).”
theconversation.com/encouraging-suicide-or-committing-manslaughter-106324

Wikipedia also has a list of people bullied into suicide
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_that_have_been_attributed_to_bullying

The only one that lists a conviction were five youths convicted for the 1997 suicide of Kelly Yeomans.

A lot of the deaths show that governments started to change laws to allow prosecution of harassers/bullies that push teens and young adults to suicide.

So I think this is a new area where before no one was prosecuted to now here there are laws such that people can be prosecuted.

Suicide rarely has one cause. The trigger is rarely the cause.

It doesn’t matter what the stats are, what matters is how this headline was chosen and framed based on the information available in the article. What do we know from the article?

• he committed suicide in March after a long-standing history of mental health problems
• his ex refused access in December, for reasons we don’t know
• his girlfriend testified it was her opinion that this was a trigger

That’s all.

Regardless of stats about male vs female suicide, and regardless of blame being attributed to a surviving partner, this is about how journalists, editors and sub-editors choose to report on such matters. The inherent misogyny here is in the editorial decision to go with that headline with scare quotes despite there being no basis for such. Someone made an editorial decision that such a headline would be more clickable. So it’s not about actual blame, it’s about how the press see the attribution of blame as fair game.

Is a female suicide ever blamed on a man in the same way?

Refuge state there are 30 suicide attempts as a result of DV every day in the UK, and 3 women succeed each week
www.refuge.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/more-refuge-campaigns/taking-lives/

But there has only been one attempt at prosecution as far as I can tell.
Gurjit Dhaliwal took her own life after enduring years of physical and psychological abuse, her husband walked free.
www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/16/ukcrime.claredyer

Refuge tried to study the problem of suicide and domestic violence but;
''We had planned to interview professionals from other sectors, including the CPS, police and health but were unsuccessful
in recruiting any participants in the required timescales, despite making repeated efforts over a period of months.''
www.refuge.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/domestic-abuse-suicide-refuge-warwick-july2018.pdf

On a thread about a woman who has lost her husband to suicide on a feminist board. JFC.

No, really do completely decontextualise my comment, which was a response to someone else's comments painting all women as perfect angels and all men at fault. Neither of these positions is true, neither sex has a lock on being in the wrong. This was my point.

I was thinking more about this and remembered something I learned at SOBS while trying to come to terms with my husbands death. The law used to be so that suicide was illegal. Even worse, the surviving spouse was held responsible for their "crime" and could be (and sometimes were) tried in a court of law for it.

So clearly society wants to blame somebody, and society tends to judge women the most harshly. So it's what we're conditioned to do - blame and judge. That's the reason I dislike seeing word bitch used to describe women - it's an insult that's reserved for women.

Thank you Coyocan and sagrada for the

However sustained harrassment or bullying, especially in a situation where the victim cannot get away, is significantly different from someone committing suicide because their wife didn't allow them access to the children or because their partner left them.

I disagree and so does the justice system.

The UK criminal justice system?

Should all suicides be signed off then, with no background looked at? There was a case in Scotland in which a young woman took her own life after sustained harassment from her ex partner, her family absolutely did hold him accountable.

Surely there must be a process available to look at the background of cases like this?

The training was in the UK.
Just to explain again, the statistics aren't going to demonstrate the attempts at suicide which weren't successful. Those attempts are not recorded.

Ok to your follow up. Disregarding guns the cdc study I pointed to shows that men also use suffocation and jumping from a high place more than women (these methods are also much more likely to result in death). I would suspect that men without access to guns would instead use other means so again more likely to complete suicide than women due to the means used not number of attempts.

I would imagine that the UK I hope has similar figures for attempt type vs completion type? But not sure where to look.

FWR- we cross posted. Yes the USA is not the world norm for methods.

Llp

Suicide prevention training? How long ago was that? And in which country? The more violent means only applies to the USA where men shoot themselves far more often than women do. In the U.K., NZ, Australia, and Europe, everywhere with strict gun control men do not use more violent means than women. The ONS statistics are very clear about the U.K. and suicide.

Maybe we agree more than it looks like. Many deaths that on the surface look like a suicide are murders or manslaughter. Which is why even if the person took the pills, ended up in front of a train or suffocated we still need to investigate the facts and circumstances to determine was the death really a suicide or something else?

I’m from the US so most research I’m aware of focuses on the sex differences in the use of guns. Guns are used for suicide much more by men than women and have a 90% completion rate. Compare this to a common mode among women, poisoning which has a 4% completion rate. Across all methods Men have an overall completion rate of about 50% while women have an overall completion rate of about 33%.

I wasn’t the pp who brought this up by the way.

www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/suicide-rates/

@PlanDeRaccordement, men do use more violet methods than women. Apologies if I didnt get that across to you in my post. Again, learned at suicide prevention training.
Could you link the case of the 15 year old please? I'd like to read that and see how the people who were bullying that girl were dealt with. I imagine the type of bullying was illegal so could have been dealt with under harassment legislation but I doubt they were convicted of suicide or manslaughter.
I'm so sorry that this seems to be a sticking point for you but you cannot force someone to commit suicide. That is murder.
@Gingerkittykat, that is so shit, I hope he's stopped making those threats now. It is awful to make someone else worry like that.

Op- yes some people with personality disorders threaten suicide to manipulate their victims but their existence doesn’t mean that people actually pushed into suicide do not exist.

No one should be automatically blamed for a suicide. It’s why investigations should be done to establish the facts and circumstances.

FWRlurker-
Ok, do you have any sources on these attempts and the wildly different methods that were used compared to completed suicides?
I don’t think attempt methods are much different from what is being tracked as your example of overdose as an attempt method is the second most common method of completed suicide under poisoning.

llp
No one should be blamed for someone else's suicide because by definition it is killing oneself. You can make someone feel very low and they can be very unwell already, but even if you put the pills in their hand, you are not the one swallowing them.

I disagree and so does the justice system. Women (not just men) are bullied into suicide all the time. A 12yr old girl in Florida jumped off a roof after being told to kill herself by 15 other girls at her school. It’s not about blaming innocent people who have inadvertently hurt a fragile persons feelings. There are evil bullies and torturers that do in fact deliberately drive people to insanity and suicide over periods of months to years.

Plan,

But your data did not include the methods used for all suicide attempts, only the methods that led to suicide completions.

The former is most relevant to the point that a major reason men complete suicide more than women is because they attempt suicide using more deadly methods.

Longlivepenis.
My post was in response to tilefloors saying that “men use more violent methods than women”

Not the women attempt more often than men statement. How did you confuse the two when everything I posted was about method not the number of attempts?

SpamChaudFroid, I really am sorry to read that

woman who refuses to allow the children's father access to children

I’m afraid that ultimately if he wants to see his kids it is his responsibility to use the law to force the issue. Just as it would be on the other direction.

But none of this justifies the implication of the pp here that the article was “accurate” to imply the suicide was caused by the ex wife behavior 3 months earlier.

This implication will harm his children and prevent all his loved ones from accepting the difficult reality - that it was his decision and due to his depression, whatever he may have said in his suicide note written at the nadir of his mental health. Not to mention harm to others who will feel responsible for their loved ones mental health when they in reality cannot be.

@SpamChaudFroid
Ah no, the pp who said that were talking about a/any woman who refuses to allow the children's father access to children for their own personal/spiteful reasons.