Shocking suicide of mother along with her infant and young daughter
The increasing trend of suicide among different classes and in all age groups and increase in group suicides, has become a humanitarian catastrophe in Iran. The victims of most of these suicides are in the country’s deprived western and southern provinces, such as Ilam, Kermanshah, Lorestan, Hamedan and Khuzistan, and mostly being women and the young, including even 13 year olds.
Suicide in Iran has strangely increased,” according to the state-run Khabar Online website. “From 2011 to 2015 suicides have increased 66% amongst women and 71% amongst men. For years, suicide statistics have not been provided to the media as they should and the entities involved mostly refuse to do so. Suicides amongst the youths are also very high.”
Considering the fact that for every suicide death, 60 suicides end in the victim surviving (state-run Young Journalists Club – 17 Jan 2016), one can imagine the horrifying scope of this social disaster.
On Monday, December 25, in Iran a 40-year-old mother threw her 10-year-old daughter off the fifth floor of a building and went on to commit suicide with her three-month-old son. This shocking event in Rezvan Shahr of Gilan Province, northern Iran, left the mother and her baby dead, and the locals utterly devastated in shock.
Two days prior to this unfortunate event, Iranian officials reported 16 suicides in the span of 40 days following the recent earthquake in western Iran, and the increasing rate of suicides in this part of the country. Prior to the quake, Kermanshah Province registered 23 suicides amongst 1,000 people, being five times the country’s average.
On December 6, reports indicate four young girls committing suicide in Mashhad, northeast Iran. This followed the suicide of two 15-year-old girls in the town of Malek Shahi.
On November 4, a 13-year-old girl hanged herself shortly after her mother committed suicide. Prior to this, a small town of Mazandaran Province, northern Iran was shaken on October 10, when a father committed suicide along with his wife and two daughters by setting the entire family ablaze.
Suicide numbers amongst women double those of men, according to state-run media outlets. Furthermore, 40% of all suicides involve self-emulation and are acts of protest. Currently in Iran under the mullahs’ rule, women have the highest number of self-emulations in the Middle East. (Jahan-e San’at daily – January 17, 2016).
The shocking scope of suicides in Iran, especially the appalling escalation of group suicides, are the result of 38 years of the mullahs’ despotic rule, providing the Iranian people with nothing but crackdown, torture and execution, parallel to poverty, corruption, unemployment, prostitution, drug addiction, etc.
Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
December 26, 2017
