Teenager’s suicide sparks soul-searching in China

SHANGHAI: The suicide of a teenager, whose sexual harassment case was dismissed, has triggered a bout of soul-searching over her treatment and anger at onlookers who encouraged her to jump off a building.

Li Yiyi, 19, died last week after throwing herself from the eighth floor of a department store in Qingyang, a city in northwest Gansu province, following four previous suicide attempts.

An outcry erupted after videos of the scene circulated online and reports that some bystanders had jeered her and urged the young woman to “jump quickly” while firefighters tried to save her.

Police said on Monday they had detained two people who had booed, and started investigations into six others for verbally abusive online posts about Li.

“The world is getting more and more indifferent. I’m scared. Just how mentally defected are those people who booed her to jump?” questioned one user on Weibo.

The teenager had been upset because prosecutors cleared a high school teacher whom she had accused of forcibly kissing her and trying take her clothes off in September 2016.

Li and her father had repeatedly sought charges against him, but local prosecutors decided not to try him, declaring that his behaviour was a “slight” offence that did not constitute a crime.

She appealed to a higher prosecutor, who also rejected her case.The teacher was briefly detained but kept his job.

“She fought for two years. Except for her father, no one including teachers, the school, the court and the prosecutor cared about her pain. Only those firefighters kept trying to save her,” a Weibo user wrote.

“The thing my daughter could not let go was the person was only lightly punished. The school didn’t admit even they did wrong. They think she made too big of a deal out of a small matter,” Li’s father told The Beijing News.

The captain of the rescue team at the local fire department, Xu Jiwei, who had intervened in Li’s previous suicide attempts, said the young woman had begged him to let her die.

Xu said in a rare emotional account that the whole firefighting squad cried after Li fell, and they were “deeply sorry” for her death.