One recent study has highlighted the long term consequences of these events on the victims by demonstrating that around 80% of women who are assaulted go on to suffer from mental health problems. There are many distressing aspects to the recent revelations but one that I found particularly tragic was news of a female production executive caught up in the media coverage who took her own life in February this year. As a suicide researcher, this story connected with me because during the course of almost two decades of suicide research interviewing those affected, I have seen first-hand the unique tragedy of each individual death.
Female suicide, in particular, has been something that has concerned me for some time. Back in 2012 while working on a large suicide study, I attended a string of events to launch suicide reports examining what can be broadly termed as suicide and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ (Scourfield, 2005). As a feminist suicide researcher, what these studies clearly indicated to me was how widely accepted the gender based nature of suicide-related behaviour was, both in the literature and in wider discourse. In these articles it was forcefully suggested that men were dying by suicide because of socio-political issues. What was also clear to me was how rarely we considered how social factors in female lives may be contributing to their deaths by suicide. In fact, apart from a few articles published mainly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was little attention paid to suicide among women at all.
Instead, most of the references to female suicide that you are likely to come across, both within the literature and in wider public discourse, newspaper articles and even Samaritans advertising campaigns, points out that suicide among women are three times less likely to die by than suicide than men. Those who have read deBeauvoir’s (1956) book The Second Sex will hardly be surprised at this ‘othering’ of a female issue, as it highlights how many aspects of female lives are simply ‘defined and differentiated with reference’ to male lives. If you ignore the suspected bias in the recording of female deaths by suicide that some authors argue mean the issue is underrepresented (Madge and Harvey, 1999), then at present statistical sources do indeed indicate that this is a statistically accurate statement. However, there are a number of problems with this discourse, not least of which is that the presence of the female suicide in these contexts is solely to highlight the ‘problem’ of male suicide. Thus seeming to dismiss the tragedy of those women who do die by suicide.
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