Forum.RttP{Suicide}

SUICIDE WEB SITES
Take my life, but please don't sexually abuse me

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Shukan Bunshun (Nov. 4)

"It was horrible . . . humiliating . . . "
Yui wanted to die. She had slashed her wrist, had hanged herself -- but to no avail. At her wits' end, she checked into a Net suicide site. On the site's bulletin board she posted a message. Would anyone, she inquired, like to join a despairing high-school girl in death?

One reply, says Shukan Bunshun, came from a 45-year-old company employee who seemed no less intent on dying than Yui. He would provide everything necessary -- car, sleeping pills, charcoal for carbon monoxide. When they met at Tokyo Station he turned out to be short, pudgy and bald. But what difference did that make?

They drove to a secluded mountain road, had a few drinks, and the man passed Yui the pills. Well, she thought, this is it.

But it wasn't. The bald, pudgy salaryman had something quite different in mind. Groggy, disoriented, Yui was dimly aware of him removing his clothes, then removing hers, then raping her. Her strength gone, resistance was out of the question.

"The next thing I know," she tells Shukan Bunshun, "I'm standing at a bus stop somewhere, the man and the car nowhere in sight."

What could she do -- go to the police? A fine story she would have for them!

She still plans to die, she says, but intends from now on to give suicide sites a wide berth.

Shukan Bunshun provides no figures, but its anecdotal evidence suggests that sexual predation of this peculiarly morbid sort is not uncommon.

Masami, unemployed and in her 20s, encountered at a suicide site a woman who agreed to die with her. They arranged to meet at Tokyo Station, but when Masami arrived she was accosted instead by three young men.

"The woman is a friend of ours," they said. "Something came up. She couldn't come."

Well, this was odd, but they got to talking, went to a coffee shop, proceeded to a bar, and Masami was touched by how well the three seemed to understand her, how deeply they sympathized. When had they slipped sleeping pills into her drink? She didn't know, but when she came to she found herself being gang-raped. Mercifully she passed out again. Some time later she woke up bruised and freezing on a street near Shinjuku Station.

Not long afterward, Masami swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. She survived.

"Sex crimes of this nature have generally been associated with deaikei (encounter) sites," Shukan Bunshun hears from a journalist. "But lately the deaikei sites are being more closely regulated" -- forcing sexual prowlers to look elsewhere for vulnerable victims. And who is more vulnerable than a would-be suicide afraid to die alone?

A man calling himself Iwao is a familiar figure at suicide sites. Shukan Bunshun hears about him from Mr. A, a man in his 30s who, with three failed suicides in his background, has turned to informal counseling.

"This guy Iwao," says Mr. A, "left messages on several suicide-site bulletin boards: 'Nagoya man, 51, seeks someone to die with. By hanging. Shall we die contentedly together?'

"The fact that he's old enough to be their father," Mr. A continues, "inspires confidence, and he seems to be a good listener."

He is also clever. Mr. Aclaims to know of two suicidal high-school girls raped by Iwao; in both cases he was careful to remove all traces of himself from his victims' cell phones.

One of the girls sought counselling from Mr. A. But there's only so much a counsellor can do. Soon after her brush with Iwao, she killed herself with another man.

"I haven't seen Iwao around lately," Mr. A says. "He's probably still out there, though, doing the same thing under a different name."