I really don't get this. Children were tortured to death in the Jewish Concentration camps in Germany, and children in Africa routinely die of starvation but none of them kill themselves.
I think you have a certain fundamental misunderstanding regarding the epidemiology of suicide. The fact is that, in most of the world anyway, suicide was and is an incredibly stigmatized action. If suicide by adults is often considered disgraceful, can you imagine the stigmatization that goes on when children commit suicide? For the families involved, a child's suicide is often seen as an extreme example of parental failure. To save families as many problems as possible, a majority of child suicides were almost certainly written off as accidents or deaths by unknown cause.
Regarding your specific examples, Jews during the Holocaust and starving children in the poorest African nations don't generally have statistics regarding deaths by suicide. Because of that, it's impossible to say precisely how many individuals chose to take their own lives; however, I'd venture to guess that it must have been more than "none". Referring to the Holocaust in particular, there are stories of people, unable to tolerate the hells that were occurring, running toward the fences in concentration camps. Their goal, of course, was to be shot and killed by Nazis who had little tolerance for attempted escapees. If not shot, the fences themselves were often electrified and capable of being used to commit suicide. Certainly some of those suicides must have been young persons.
[Side note: Concentration camp suicides have been studied to some extent, and details related particularly to Auschwitz - Birkenau are available
in this 1986 research.
While solid statistics for your specific examples don't exist, we do have statistics from one nation that has historically been more fair to suicides than most other countries. Japan has been reporting a large seeming, but honestly fairly stable, rate of suicides since at least 1950. In 2009, it reported a suicide rate amongst five to fourteen year olds of 1 per 200,000. Extrapolating from that data, the 1950 rate would have been approximately 1 in 250,000. Child suicide has always happened, but it has only just become okay to talk about it.
Now, when a child kills themself, they go back and think maybe there were incidents of bullying perhaps. What in the world is going on? ?? WHY are these children in fairly comfortable conditions killing themselves because their clothes or shoes are made fun of?
You have a point. I believe that, in of itself, bullying does not cause any significant amount of suicides. The problem is that bullying compounds other issues. A child whose only problem is being bulled at school will probably not attempt suicide; but a child who is bullied at school and suffers from depression, or is being abused, or feels unloved at home and/or church, etc. is a lot more likely to hurt themselves.
Using myself as an example, I'll tell you a brief story that I haven't posted here before. Fourteen months ago, [ame="http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5652808&postcount=83"]I posted about the bullying that occurred while I was in school.[/ame] What I didn't post was that my home experience wasn't much different, and I had an abusive older relative. I'm also a lesbian and I attended a church that was strongly hateful of such. (I'm NOT bashing religion here. At the time, I had no idea that some churches were so welcoming!) The majority of my family wasn't exactly happy about it either.
I began self-injuring (cutting myself), and I even attempted suicide when I was twelve years old. Yes, it was via hanging. What saved me? I'm terrible at tying knots. That sounds like a bad joke, but I assure you it isn't. I literally could not adequately tie a knot. Eventually I received psychological help. I was diagnosed with clinical depression, and I was helped come to terms with things that I wasn't at fault for.
The point of the story is this: I wouldn't have attempted suicide if just one or two things were different. If my school life had been better . . . If my home life had been better . . . If I'd been in a more accepting church . . . If I hadn't suffered from depression . . . Bullying won't take you to the cliff, but it can sure throw you off of it.
I also think it's worth mentioning that issues with bullying are more unavoidable today than they were just ten years ago. I'm in my mid-twenties, so I've had the experience of being in school on both sides of that ten year line. What's made bullying more unavoidable? The spread of technology.
When I first began school, I knew almost no one who had access to a computer. Of those who did, none of them had access to the Internet. Around 1996, the period wherein America Online started offering access for $19.95 a month, more and more of those people with computers found themselves on the Internet. The ICQ instant messenger program was released later in 1996, and AOL Instant Messenger was released in 1997. It suddenly became possible for children to contact each other outside of school, without using anything that would alert parents as to what was going on.
That still wasn't a huge problem. Most children obviously wouldn't give out their screen names to bullies at their schools, and a lot of them still didn't even have computers in the first place. All of this changed in the early 2000s. Computer prices had gone way down, broadband Internet services had become readily available to most of North America, cell phones were becoming extremely popular, and social networking sites were rapidly popping into existence. Friendster showed up in 2002, MySpace in 2003, and this was followed by Facebook's debut in 2004. If bullies didn't know their target's screen names, that was no longer a problem. They could just look them up by name, and the odds were favorable that their victims would have an account on at least one social networking site.
Worse for bullied children, the Internet was rapidly spreading to devices that weren't computers. Portable phones, video gaming systems, e-readers, and the like were all able to connect to the Internet. Most bullied children today can now be accessed 24/7.
When I first began school, going home meant that I no longer had to deal with bullies. The weekends and summer vacation meant that I didn't have to deal with my bullies for a good long while. When I left school, going home meant that the bullies would be right there waiting for me.
Apologies for being long-winded, but I thought this deserved an in depth post.
