Suicide Internet Sites: A Progress Report

Following our visit to Westminster in 2004 to present our petition and meet with Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland, the New Year started with a debate in Parliament in which the role of PAPYRUS in highlighting the issue was acknowledged. The debate was supported by a number of cross party MPs, but the government’s position was disappointing in so far as it refused to consider any revision of the 1961 Suicide Act. The debate attracted national media attention and was discussed in the radio 4 programme PM including a contribution by PAPYRUS.

 

The New Year also tragically brought the case of Sarah Cherry who took her life after obtaining a book on suicide via the internet.  The case was taken up by the Lancashire Evening Post who ran a series of articles highlighting the dangers of suicide sites. Papyrus made contributions to these articles and Tony Cox attended a meeting at the Lancashire Evening Post in February looking at ways in which the campaign might proceed.

 

In February we contacted Baroness Scotland to ask for an update on our concerns. Her reply confirmed that it is the government’s opinion that the provision of information via the internet is not illegal and that they could not foresee a revision of the 1961 Suicide Act.

 

More positively there was news of progress towards adapting search engines to enable them to bring up more acceptable sites such as the Samaritans in preference to offensive and harmful sites. The government is also looking at ways ISPs may be empowered to remove offensive sites in response to customer complaint.

 

The election campaign in April/May effectively put on hold any political campaigning.

Unfortunately August brought another report of an internet related suicide by a young person, Carina Stephenson, which hit the headlines and again brought the issue to the fore.  This time the Yorkshire Post took up the campaign, and Carina’s mother, Liz Taylor, is working alongside us to achieve regulation of these sites. Liz has a petition which can be found at http://www2.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/darksideweb/index.html  where you can sign online to register your concern.

 

Media interest tends to react to individual cases, and the recent death of two people who met via the internet again stimulated intense interest. We have sought to use this to increase public awareness of the problem and at the same time ‘educate’ the media into responsible reporting of a huge tragedy in peoples’ lives. REAL magazine published an informative article in June making use of information supplied by PAPYRUS. Sky News started its revamped in-depth news reporting with a major item on the tragic case of Carina Stevenson with a contribution from PAPYRUS. One of our members, Martyn Piper, also presented our case very effectively in a recent interview on Radio Five Live. Tony and Denise in the office and myself have been kept busy dealing with enquiries from numerous media including Readers Digest, Grazia Magazine, Mirror, Sunday Telegraph, Radio 1 News, BBC ‘Inside/Out, Harpers Magazine and an academic interested in reasons why people use suicide chatrooms,

 

Where do we go from here? It is my belief that we must continue to press for progress in the three original strands of our campaign:

 

1.  To raise awareness of the issue especially amongst parents and carers. We will continue to press the government for more effective action in this area.

 

2.  A most promising development is the enabling of ISPs to take down offensive sites even though they may not be illegal.  There remain issues of who decides what is “offensive” and the need for a regulatory body or “hotline” to which people can complain.  We will continue to press the government and the Internet Watch Foundation on this.

Ultimately we are seeking a revision of the 1961 Suicide Act to make it illegal for internet sites to publish material which has the sole purpose of encouraging and aiding suicide.

 

3.  We have drawn the government’s attention to the latest developments in Australia where it is now illegal to encourage suicide via the internet and ISPs have to provide filters to block out sites which are hosted abroad. We continue to recognise that suicide sites are an international problem and our government should be working with the EU and other international bodies such as the UN to tackle the issue. 

 

4 The support of our members has been and continues to be the backbone of our campaign.  With a new parliament, we intend to target as many MPs as we can to ask for their support in getting the matter debated again in Parliament with a view to achieving a revision of the Suicide Act of 1961. The letters members wrote last year highlighted the issue for many MPs who would otherwise have shown little interest.  So once more we are calling on the good offices of our members to contact their individual MPs. A standard letter from our office would be given very little priority by most MPs but a letter from a constituent will be very much more effective!

 

If you are willing to help us in this work, you can approach it in a number of ways. You can fill in the details of your name and address on the attached letter and send it off to your MP. But a more effective way would be to copy out the letter, include your name and address, and send it off – this way it would not be obvious that it was a ‘standard’ letter! Or indeed you may wish to write your own letter! Whatever method you choose we will be very grateful for your help and please do send us any response from your MP so that we know who supports us.

 

If you would like more information of our work in this area please do contact the office.

 

 Paul Kelly