p. 6 | Juvenile Suicide?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 5, 1903

Juvenile Suicide?

ARE we not truly living in a time when the hearts of the fathers need to be turned to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers (Mal. 4:6), when such a condition of things exists as is pointed out in the following from the Chicago Tribune, under the heading, “Juvenile Suicide?”—

It probably never has occurred to sociologists who make a study of homicide that the crime of self-murder is increasing much more rapidly than that of murder, and out of all proportion to the increase of population, and that this is so the world over. Statistics recently published in England show that in France the rate has increased during the last twenty-five years from 157 to 224 per million of population, and in Germany the rate is about the same. In Austria during the same time it has increased 39 per million, in Hungary, 27; in Scotland, 18; in England, 15; and in Ireland, 8. Russia is the only country in Europe which shows no increase in the rate. What the increase has been in the United States during twenty-five years it is not possible to state, as the statistics for that period are not at hand. The increase, however, in 1902 and 1901 was 1,000, the total being 8,245. At the ratio of increase for the first three months the number for 1903 will be considerably larger than that for 1902. It is a melancholy feature of the suicide record for 1902 that three times as many women committed suicide as in 1901. That proportion is maintained during the first quarter of 1903.

A still more melancholy feature of the record is the large number of children and young people who commit suicide. During the ten years from 1887 to 1897 in Europe over four hundred persons under fifteen years of age killed themselves, and seventy-six of these were girls. The number of children committing suicide in this country is increasing year by year. Within the last two weeks a boy of thirteen at Marine City, Mich., shot himself rather than go to church; a young married woman only sixteen drowned herself at Port Jervis, N. Y., because her husband of eighteen would not give her an Easter bonnet; a boy of fifteen at Baltimore shot himself because he had to work; a boy of eighteen at Hamilton, Ohio, hanged himself because he was cheated in a horse trade; a girl of seventeen in Chicago poisoned herself because her mother forgot to deliver a message to her boy lover; and a young man of eighteen also poisoned himself in this city because he failed to find his sweetheart at home when he called. These are only a few of the many cases of juvenile suicide. It is easy in most cases of adults to understand the motive which leads to suicide, irrational though it may be, but it is not easy to understand what it is that is urging so many children and young persons to take their lives at a time when life is full of promise, and they are in the heyday of physical strength and enjoyment, and have had none of the cares, and trials, and disappointments which afflict their elders. Among all the hard questions put to civilization none is harder than these: Why is suicide increasing so fast, and why are so many women and children committing suicide? What is wrong?