A Cautionary tale

By Kath Noble

(February 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) A couple of weeks ago, a fourteen-year-old girl from Matale committed suicide. She hung herself. While her mother was out of the house, she found a length of rope and tied one end to the roof and the other round her neck. For some reason, she didn’t want to go on living. Her mother told the inquest that it was for want of money to buy the exercise books she needed for school. She was just starting to study for her O Level examinations.

I almost can’t believe this is true. It’s such an appaling tragedy.

But of course there must be so many similar cases. We all know Sri Lanka has an unusually high suicide rate, with the latest figures reported to the World Health Organisation being an average of 45 deaths per 100,000 amongst men and 17 amongst women. At one stage, it was reported that more than double the number of people who had been killed in the war had committed suicide. That’s pretty disturbing, given the effort we put into discussing the conflict and its impact.

I haven’t seen much in the way of interest in talking about the issue of people taking their own lives. Perhaps the Government has an excellent strategy in place, but it could hardly hurt to check. And even the most fanatical supporters of central planning would have to admit that the problem can’t be tackled by the State alone. It needs the attention of society as a whole.

Witness the last incident to attract widespread publicity, when a girl strung herself up by her tie in the bathroom of a Colombo school after being caught with a mobile phone. That was about six months ago, and the Government responded with a ban that most of us could see wasn’t going to be in the slightest bit helpful, whatever our take on the need for children to have a means of communication in their backpacks. For a start, mobile phones were already outlawed in the institution the girl attended, hence the need for her to be disciplined. Officials at the Ministry of Education skipped their classes on logic, we can only assume. They need all the help they can get.

The editorial of this newspaper pointed out some days later that we ought not to be focusing on what provoked the girl but on why she was expected to have valued her life in the first place. It stressed the need to look seriously at the treadmill existence children undergo these days, as they trudge from home to school to tuition class, getting up at the crack of dawn and going to bed late with not a great deal in the way of fun in between. There is so much pressure to perform academically that a girl might not feel she would be missing much if she were dead. Even pastimes like singing and dancing have been made into competitions.

No such reflection has taken place. And it’s hard to understand why.

There’s a commonly held belief that the prevalence of suicide in this country has something to do with culture. The theory goes that people who are convinced by the idea of rebirth don’t take death as seriously as they might otherwise. They consider it an escape.

The trouble is that this doesn’t make sense. Most religions are keen on telling us that there is some kind of life after death, and there are plenty of countries that do better in terms of the number of people taking their own lives, including ones where the dominant faith is Buddhism. And they do so by a long way. More to the point, it doesn’t explain why Sri Lanka had an undeniably low suicide rate until a few decades ago. It recorded an average of 6 deaths per 100,000 at one point, and the increase in the global rate since then has been considerably slower. The proportion of children killing themselves has also gone up.

It’s about time such arguments were cast aside. They are popular only because to believe them is to be persuaded that little can be done.

Reports of a study on stress affecting children in China caught my attention shortly after reading about the death of the girl from Matale. Carried out by British researchers in collaboration with the local authorities, it found that as many as a third of those attending school experienced physical symptoms like headaches and nausea on a regular basis. Children as young as six were afflicted. There had also been a number of suicides among adolescents, which is what first attracted attention to the issue.

The context is very different, but there are surely things to be learnt from such an investigation. The underlying cause of the problem found was said to be pressure to make the most of the new opportunities that are opening up as the country develops.

Sri Lanka is going through this process too. And the education system only adds to the burden children have to put up with.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that there are so few places in universities, for example. This has been said a million times, but nothing ever seems to be done. Indeed, we find that certain advancements are being reversed under pressure from people who should know better. I am thinking here of the opposition to the private medical college at Malabe, which has prompted students at Peradeniya to boycott lectures for the last three weeks or more. They have been promised that the school will be closed down. It is perverse, even to somebody like me who has always been strongly critical of private education, when so many children are paying several times more than the Rs. 6 million it costs to get a degree from Malabe to study at foreign institutions. Students forget how lucky they are to receive free education the moment they set foot on campus.

In the circumstances, these issues need to be looked at with an open mind.

But it’s not clear who is even ready to think. Reaction is as much as we normally get, and it tends to be worse than useless.

The story of the fourteen year old girl from Matale went unnoticed by the majority of us. It happened in the middle of the election campaign, when politicians were too busy calling each other names and people were too eager to listen. We were caught up in some kind of bad soap opera. What’s more, the girl didn’t attend a prominent school. And she was poor. That would usually be enough to ensure that her plight was ignored or at least quickly forgotten.

It’s hard to get upset about this when the only likely result of wider awareness of her death would be the Government deciding to prohibit the use of exercise books.

That her mother couldn’t afford to buy what the girl needed for school is another tragedy. At a time when much is being made of Sri Lanka’s entry into the group of Middle Income Countries, this serves as a useful reminder of the difficulties that so many people face on a daily basis.