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Chanelle Rae (14) committed suicide after being cyber-bullied
Filed Under:
Suicide - Undetermined
Published: Jul 21, 2009 @ 11:34 PM
Chanelle Rae (14)
Date:
Jul 17, 2009
Suicide by:
Undetermined
Location:
Victoria, Australia
URL:
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Beyond Blue Chairman Jeff Kennett has offered his support to the family of 14-year-old girl Chanelle Rae, who killed herself last Friday.
Kennett, speaking to Denis Walter on the Afternoons program after Rae's mother Karen had earlier made an impassioned plea on Neil Mitchell's Mornings program, also defended the Chanelle's Western Heights College principal, Kris Rooney.
"I am altering my schedule so that Thursday night with other professionals we will be going down to speak to all the parents of the children at the school," Kennett said on Tuesday afternoon.
"It affects the parents, it affects the teachers and I have to say the principal is quite an outstanding person in the way she has been managing the situation at the school."
"She has a lot of support on standby that they have been using - it's very measured and very responsible. While I can not discuss the details of the four cases I can assure you it's not quite as it's portrayed although we have got to accept the reality there have been four deaths of four young children."
In a day where 'a bedroom is still somewhere kids can be tormented by way of a computer or a mobile phone', Kennett said it is up to parents to adjust to the changing times.
"I have often thought about how different life is in 2009 than we I grew up as a young boy in the environment of my family back in the early 50s - very, very different. But that only means that we have got to be prepared to adjust . talk to our children differently." said Kennett.
"This has happened to Geelong but there is another town near Geelong that has had six suicides in recent times. And there was another town in Victoria where there were an even larger number of suicides in a 12-month period."
"This is happening at a time the suicide rate has dropped from around 2700 per year to around 1900 . but it's still substantially more than the road toll. You think about how we as a community how we focus on improving the quality of our vehicle and our roads and education compared to what I consider to be the importance of education about the quality of our lives."
Earlier, Karen Rae spoke to Neil Mitchell on order to alert Australian parents of the dangers of cyber-bullying.
"I want to tell people to keep their kids off the rotten internet - this horrible place," she said. "This MSN (messenger) and these other things, the first thing the police said was they are getting bullied and have problems at school and they come and get on the internet and its continuous and there's no break for them."
"Friday night she was on the internet and came in and told me some message came through and she wanted to die because of the message and I lay in bed with her and discussed it for about an hour and she left me fairly happy."
"She didn't come in and say 'I am going to kill myself', which she never, ever, ever had in her head. She was the brightest, happiest most loving child you could ever meet - that's why this has hit the community so hard."
Karen told Neil that an hour after she had discussed the internet message with Chanelle her daughter was found dead by Karen's husband. Chanelle was a member of the Geelong Football Club cheer squad.
Chanelle's family believes the first three suicides by students at the same school helped put the idea in her head.
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Jeff Kennett offers his support
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