Blaming women for men's suicide

[Gingerkittykat]

Ex blamed for causing mean's suicide.

I'm so angry at this article, and not just because I am arguing with a local MRA about it. The man was obviously in a bad place and let down badly by mental health services but lets blame the woman because that is easier.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

I disagree and so does the justice system.

The UK criminal justice system?

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 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

the statistics aren't going to demonstrate the attempts at suicide which weren't successful. Those attempts are not recorded.

If the attempts are no recorded llp, then how can you say that there are all these suicide attempts that use very different methods from completed suicides? It is most likely that people choose the same suicide methods and some complete but others do not.

In the U.K., NZ, Australia, and Europe, everywhere with strict gun control men do not use more violent means than women

I don't think that is true. Farming is a high risk occupation for suicide and many farmers have legal access to firearms. I've never heard of a female farmer using a gun to kill herself. I personally know of 3 male farmers who did.

For goodness sake, who do you think delivered the training? A mental health charity. This information is gained directly from people who have made attempts and wound up with psychiatric services, and fed back to services to support people with mental ill health.
You seem very desperate to prove that males and females do the same thing.
Here is the truth. Males and females are different, and men are much more likely to use more violent methods to attempt suicide such as hanging or jumping which are more likely to be successful.
Women are more likely to use less violent methods.
In this case, a male blamed a female for his suicide which of course is not her fault because no-one an force someone else to kill themselves.

I’ll say it again: this thread is about whether the press should present blame in a headline when the details of the case don’t specify that to be true.

I don’t know why people are trying to argue about attributing blame in suicide. The issue here is this publication has already done so without basis.

Why have they done this? Why is it acceptable?

You can all believe it’s not true that men and women use the same methods in the same order of frequency but you are not arguing with me and an opinion of a random Frenchwomen on the internet but the actual facts of real life suicides in the U.K. as reported by the U.K.’s ONS

Mumsnet, where UK wide tracked and reported facts by ONS can be dismissed with repeated “but men chose more violent methods this charity said so in some suicide thing I went to ages ago” and another person chiming in “But, I know 3 farmers who have shot themselves,....”

Yet the same ONS that reports on facts of majority male violence is counted to be 100% true.

You can’t pick and choose facts. You can’t use personal anecdotes to replace facts. They simply are. I’m not desperate, I’m astonished at the lack of a fact based discussion.

Notbad..
I agreed a few pages back that thebpress should in an ideal world not report anything other than what an inquest or investigation has released. Sadly, the press reports things sensationally all the time about everything. Lives and reputations have been ruined by the press. There isn’t really anything that can be done about it.

So awful, if he died of cancer or a stroke would that be the fault of a woman in his life too?

People who take their own lives do exactly that. Nobody else takes their lives for them.

"Look what you made me do" cannot be applied and "look what you made him do" is just another version of that.

There is some research published this week showing the structural changes in people's brains that lead them to take their own lives. The sooner poor mental health is treated as the illness it is the better.

www.news-medical.net/news/20191202/Researchers-identify-brain-networks-that-play-key-role-in-suicide-risk.aspx

There isn’t really anything that can be done about it.

Yes there bloody well is. You can focus on this issue rather than be distracted and talk about another issue and complain to the editor and/or IPSO like I’ve done.

This thread is about how women are portrayed in the media, whether that be about a man’s suicide, a man who kills his partner/family, the personal lives of female victims etc etc. It can be changed with direct action. It won’t be changed by arguing with someone about something off topic.

This thread is about how women are portrayed in the media, whether that be about a man’s suicide, a man who kills his partner/family, the personal lives of female victims etc etc.

Yes. That was original topic and it is being discussed and I have posted on it. But then people started posting opinions contrary to fact and so there was a need to post a few U.K. facts.

To get back to the original topic would be nice, I agree. I don’t think your complaint to the editor will accomplish anything. They generate income by clicks and you have no consumer power in the case of free online news. So they will continue to word titles as click bait because that is how they fund their salaries.

It’s also not a women’s issue as the press does this constantly towards all people.

I don’t think your complaint to the editor will accomplish anything

And that’s why I complained to IPSO. There are press standards.

The portrayal of women in death in the media resulted in IPSO publishing guidelines:

act.welevelup.org/campaigns/54

after people complained enough. So it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it enough people complain about this sort of reporting then it will change too.

Yes there are press standards which women's groups have got changed over the years in various ways.

Eg when women who were prostitutes were murdered, when I was young, that was how they were described. Not woman murdered, not a name, but prostitute murdered.

That has changed after work by women's groups, to get these women humanised, treated with more respect.

The idea that these things can't be changed is a gross lie and I wonder why anyone would come onto a feminism board and tell women not to bother trying to make things better.