But according to Michele Elliott director of the children’s charity Kidscape the problem of violent school rivalry is
But according to Michele Elliott, director of the children’s charity Kidscape, the problem of violent school rivalry is getting worse “It’s a burning issue,” she says. For some the experience is so distressing that they refuse to attend school.A straw poll she conducted recently highlighted how common the problem is. When she talked to a class of 22 13-year-old boys in a middle-class north London school recently, 20 said they had experienced some form of attack, yet only one had told his parents. It is not hard to see why: teenagers do not want to relinquish the precious new freedoms their parents have just begun to grant.When children do report the incidents to their parents, they can be are almost blase in their response. As one mother with three teenage sons at an independent school in West London puts it: “All teenage boys get mugged. It’s a fact of life – they just have to learn to deal with it.”Michael Solomon Williams, 15, has endured three frightening incidents – an attack by a gang of five on the Tube going home to north London and two of demands for money. James Spicer, Tony’s only close non-family friend, had seen him several times a week for six years.
“I used to say, ‘Are you OK, Tony?’ and he always said he was fine He never said how he felt He was polite, well-mannered, no one hated him. Ten days after his death his family learned his results: he had only just made the grade.Joe, his 16-year old brother, wonders whether the future became overwhelming as Tony stood at the brink of adulthood. “Maybe,” he says, “he was just scared and did not see the point of going on Maybe he thought it was too much hassle. Maybe, he had been thinking about it for so long, it all piled on top of him and he just couldn’t carry on.”But this is all “maybe”, because no one knows for sure. He needed three Cs at A-level to win at place to study chemistry at Leicester University.
Was the break-up of his parents’ marriage the previous year a factor; Tony stayed with his father, while his mother moved nearby with his brother and sister? Perhaps, although no one can remember him talking about it. Maybe, like many suicide victims, he was fretting about exam results. “What hurts me most,” Diana Dwyer says, “is that Tony cannot have realised what he was doing to us, because there was no way he would have done it if he had known.”So why did Tony Dwyer kill himself? You can speculate, as his family has done endlessly. She is convinced that depressive illness in young people, sparked off by the stresses of adolescence, is at the heart of the problem. She has found that signs of illness that can be recognised with hindsight were missed at the time.Many of those who have died, she says, were very loving people, just like Tony Dwyer The type who never complain.
Suicide notes, she says, speak of, “how the individual feels that the family will be better off without them … These are deeply caring and sensitive people who, even in their extreme depression are often trying to lessen the pain of others. A suicide note is, I believe, often the final act of love.”The irony is that these caring people leave their families devastated. The statistics for young men are particularly worrying – suicide attempts among this group have doubled in the past decade. Although far more women than men make suicide attempts, those by men are much more likely to prove fatal.The epidemic has prompted the creation of Papyrus, a support group for parents whose sons have killed themselves.
They have conducted research among members, in an attempt to identify common themes and enable other parents to spot the danger signs before it is too late.Jean Kerr, a founder whose 17-year-old son, Edward, took his life in 1989, has questioned 79 sets of parents. The precise time of his suicide is recorded on his funeral order of service But no reason is given. He left no note.There are many cases like this every year, as hundreds of young people kill themselves: in 1995 632 young men and 151 young women under 25 died by their own hands. Only last week, Daniel Kirwan, 16, was found hanging from a tree at his home in Cheshire.
