A 14-year-old girl killed herself after sending herself 'vile' messages on social media. Hannah Wright was thought to have fallen foul of trolls after she went onto Ask.fm to research the eczema she was suffering with. Met by messages of ‘do us all a favour n kill ur self’, ‘go comit suicide but suced pls’, ‘go die’ and ‘go cut ur self n die’, she later tidied her room and hung herself.
However, following an inquest, the IP address of the messages posted was discovered to match that of Hannah’s, proving strong evidence that Hannah had, in fact, written the messages to herself. ‘The evidence I have was that on the balance of probabilities they would all have been at Hannah’s own hand. Why she did it, I don’t know,’ coroner Catherine Mason told the court.
There was ‘no evidence’ to indicate that Hannah had been bullied. But her dad, David Smith, told the court that she had been involved in a fight at a party five months before her death, ‘She went to a party and had her head smashed against a wall, twice.’ And Hannah’s older sister Joanne also said that she had ‘ripped out the hair’ of someone she thought was bullying Hannah. And, according to her headteacher at Lutterworth High School, there had been incidents of Hannah bullying other people. Nora Parker told the inquest at Leicester and South Leicester Coroners Court that Hannah had been dealt with ‘on two separate occasions'.
A spokesperson for BeatBullying told The Debrief that this phenomenon – self-bullying – is not something they had heard of before, saying, 'We hope cases of self-cyberbullying are extremely rare. Indeed, we haven’t come across this in our 12-year history as a charity, but where it does occur, we need to understand why.'
They added that addressing issues of cyberbullying extends much further than blaming individual social media sites for the way they are used. 'As new social networking sites emerge constantly, and young people’s use and understanding of the internet evolves, much more research is needed on the connection between online behaviour and mental health issues,' they said. 'We already know the devastating effect that being cyberbullied by someone else can have on a young person, but we’re only just beginning to see how the internet can be used as a tool for self-harm.'
Support and advice from mentors and professional counsellors is available to young people aged 11-17 at BeatBullying.org.*
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.