Response of Education Department of Khorasan Razavi to the Suicide of a 12-Year-Old Girl

The Education Department of Khorasan Razavi province has reacted to the suicide of a 12-year-old girl in Mashhad, stating that she was "not expelled from school" and has requested the investigator of the case to inform them of the "various aspects of the case." The news of the girl's suicide was published in the middle of last week. Initial reports indicated that she had been "expelled for a week" due to "misbehavior." The girl had thrown herself from the fourth floor of a building. Additionally, it has been reported that in the initial investigations, a handwritten note was found from her saying, "Please distribute my belongings among my friends. Dear mom and dad, I love you. If I kill myself, it is not because of you, it is because of myself." The girl's father told the investigator that the school had asked him to come in for a discussion due to her low grades. He had "harshly confronted" his daughter. At the same time, this teenage girl had brought an item to school that she should not have. According to the father, this resulted in the girl's "one-week expulsion." However, on May 30, the Khorasan Razavi Education Department called the expulsion of the girl "a complete lie." According to ILNA news agency, Mohammad Reza Farahani Nia, the head of public relations for the Khorasan Razavi Education Department, stated, "First, whether this incident was a suicide or not must be confirmed or denied by the judiciary, and this incident did not occur within the school premises but at home." The head of public relations further stated, "What does a sixth grader know about what suicide is?" These statements come at a time when reports of youth suicides in Iran have previously been published. Just two weeks prior, the police commander of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad had reported that a sixth-grade student in a village in that province had hanged herself and committed suicide. According to statistics provided by a member of the Tehran City Council in November 2015, covering only the years 2002 to 2004, 111 children aged between eight and thirteen had committed suicide in Iran. That same year, two newspapers, Rouzan and Jahan San'at, warned about the "educational and familial collapse" and the increasing suicide rates among Iranian students. Two weeks ago, the newspaper Etemad also reported that Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, the Minister of Health in Hassan Rouhani's government, had warned about the "expansion of social harms" and the rise in depression following the news of the suicides of three middle-aged men and three young girls, calling for media assistance to prevent a "suicide epidemic." In this context, the Minister of Health reported high depression rates in Iran, warning from two ministers about the increase in poverty, suicide, addiction, and depression.