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 It seems like a chapter taken right out of your regular horror book. Somebody commits suicide, and mysterious messages appear urging others to do the same.
Thing is, this isn't a horror story, but such an incident occurred (or is still happening) among a group of Dutch teens, where various SMS are sent to their respective mobile phones, daring them to commit suicide. People trace it to the suicide of a girl last March at a school in Enschede, a city in the north-eastern province of Overijssel on the German border.
"Who dares to?" was the repeated text message. Basically, this SMS was sent to various Dutch teens. Curious, a fourteen year-old responded that she will, only to receive another SMS asking details as to how exactly she'll commit suicide.
"It got really scary, so that I told my parents, who told the school," said the 14-year-old.
Hermann van Engeland, who specializes in
child psychiatry at Utrecht University's medical centre, thinks it's some sort of a dare. He adds that suicide
and talking about it somehow raise status among the young. Why, you ask? Well, Van Engeland is as clueless as we are. Also, this kind of mindless "fun" (for the sender of the SMS, given that there's really someone doing this) definitely shows "dangers of modern, instant-communication technology."
People might be doing it for kicks, but it seems that this is not everybody's idea of fun. Hopefully those scary SMS will disappear soon; a girl committing suicide isn't funny at all.
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