Kiwiblog

Matthew Backhouse in the Herald reported:

Families of suicide victims have urged Prime Minister John Key to consider a review of the “abusive” coronial inquest system.

The meeting comes after a spate of youth suicides have rocked communities in Masterton and the small Bay of Plenty logging town of Kawerau in recent months.

Suicide prevention group Casper, and victims’ families and supporters from Kawerau, yesterday presented Mr Key with its latest strategy on tackling suicide. It calls for shifting suicide prevention efforts from mental health clinics to families and communities.

Casper spokeswoman Maria Bradshaw said the group asked Mr Key to conduct a review of the coroner’s court, which is tasked with identifying lessons to be learned from individual suicides and making recommendations to prevent further deaths. …

The group called on Mr Key to consider a Royal Commission of Inquiry into suicide, which he said he would consider.

Mr Key has already indicated his commitment to tackling the issue, having instructed his department to launch a review of the youth suicide rate, which is the highest per-capita in the developed world for girls and the third highest for boys.

I recall the first time a teenage friend of mine killed themselves. I still think of her quite often, and think about what could have been done to prevent her suicide.

But there is no one view on how best to change things, even amongst families of those who killed themselves. A different view to that of Ms Bradshaw and Casper can be found at the Vendetta on Suicide blog, specifically this post:

Rebecca Todd in The Press reports:

Families of suicide victims are angry their voices were not included in a ministerial review of media reporting on suicide, a spokeswoman says. …

Maria Bradshaw, co-founder of family support group CASPER, said the committee’s review was missing the voices of the victims of suicide and families were “tired of Government inaction on the issue”. Families were restricted by the Coroners Act as they could not say publicly how their loved one died, for instance in funeral notices, until the coroner had made a ruling.

Bradshaw had a court order imposed to stop her discussing her son’s suicide publicly before the coroner had ruled on his death.

“That’s no way to treat a victim group. It just increases the isolation and stigma,” she said.

And is ineffective.

Newspaper Publishers’ Association chief executive Tim Pankhurst said the explosion in social networking made the Coroners Act largely irrelevant.

“If a teenager is killed, then hundreds of people are going to be Facebooking or tweeting about that within a couple of hours. Those kids aren’t reading newspapers or looking at news websites,” he said.

Exactly. Often it is the deceased’s own Facebook page where the news is broken, and people console.

The Herald reports:

An internet safety group has backed the Prime Minister’s view that the public reporting of suicide is now virtually beyond control, because young people routinely discuss cases on websites.

John Key said yesterday that Parliament could “explore” the rules on suicide reporting because they were “somewhat defunct these days”.

“The reality is that, particularly with youth suicide, very quickly social networking sites like Facebook and blog sites report that. There’s huge engagement with young people around that information and so I don’t think blocking the media from reporting is achieving an awful lot.”

He said it would make sense to review the rules, but it was important to tread carefully because of the risk of copycat suicides.

The director of NetSafe, Martin Cocker, said Mr Key’s assessment was “bang on”.

I think we underestimate the capacity of kids to cope with information. The Internet has opened up the world to kids, and most of them cope fine with it.

On Twitter the other day I saw someone tweet how they had asked their two year old what she was doing on the computer, and her response was “checking facebook”!.

Mr Key was responding to chief coroner Judge Neil MacLean’s suggestion that reporting restrictions be eased.

He wants to encourage more openness, public debate and responsible media coverage of suicide, in the hope that this might reduce the suicide rate.

Which it hasn’t greatly.

I’ve just blogged at curiablog, on a morality poll by UMR. Respondents were asked how morally acceptable (or unacceptable certain activities were. Below is the morally acceptable score for each activity and the net acceptable score (acceptable less unacceptable)

From most to least acceptable, they were:

1. Divorce 81%, +68%
2. Sex outside marriage 77%, +59%
3. Having baby outside marriage 71%, +48%
4. Stem cell research 63%, +38%
5. Homosexual relations 61%, +29%
6. Euthanasia 55%, +18%
7. Abortion 55%, +21%
8. Gambling 52%, +10%
9. Animal medical testing 52%, +12%
10. Wearing or buying fur 48%, +4%
11. Death Penalty 43%, -7%
12. Animal Cloning 27%, -40%
13. Suicide 20%, -48%
14. Married people having affairs 13%, -70%
15. Polygamy 11%, -74%
16. Human cloning 7%, -81%

Now this was asking about moral acceptability, not legality. So while only 55% think abortion is morally acceptable, that doesn’t mean only 55% think it should be legal.

Now what would my answers have been. None of the first ten I would regard as morally unacceptable. I do regard the death penalty as unacceptable – not keen on states being able to kill it citizens. Tend to regard suicide as morally unacceptable in most circumstances but not all (ie terminally ill). While generally I think it is not a good idea for married people to have affairs (and if married I would not), I’m wouldn’t label it as morally unacceptable as it is between those two people. I don’t think polygamy should be legal but nor do I regard it as morally unacceptable. And finally I don’t believe human cloning is automatically morally unacceptable.  I favour very very tight restrictions on it, but think there are potential benefits.

So bottom line is there is very little I believe is always morally unacceptable. Mainly just the death penalty really.

I’m sure very few here will agree with me!