Bereaved families call for inquiry into UK Government ‘failures’ over pro-suicide forums

Families of suicide victims are calling for a public inquiry into “major failures” of the UK Government to protect vulnerable young people from taking their own lives after accessing a pro-suicide forum online.  

According to a report from the Molly Rose Foundation, a charity that focuses on suicide prevention, the government was warned 65 times about the forum but did not act quickly enough to close it down.

In the forum, which the report does not name, users promoted a toxic chemical which can be used to commit suicide and encouraged vulnerable young people to take their own lives.

The report outlines that at least 133 lives were lost to the toxic chemical over the last five years, with the true figure potentially being “far higher”.  

In a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the families of nine victims and one survivor of the forum wrote: “Our loved ones were victims of a scandal about a deadly forum and lethal poison but also about successive governments that acted too slowly to heed the warnings, if at all.

“There has been an institutional failure across multiple Government departments and public bodies that demands scrutiny and it is only through the scrutiny of a public inquiry that lessons can truly be learned.  This series of failings requires a statutory response, not just to understand why our loved ones died but also to prevent more lives being lost in a similar way.”

According to the report, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology were warned of the threat 45 times using Prevention of Future Death (PFD) reports submitted by coroners. The reports submitted to the government repeatedly mentioned pro-suicide forums and the toxic chemical used to commit suicide, but “multiple red flags” were missed in the government’s “consistently insufficient response to a predictable but entirely preventable harm”. 

The forum, which is based out of the US, is currently blocked in the UK. The report says that this is due to the site voluntarily geo-blocking itself in the UK at the request of Ofcom.

Earlier this year, Ofcom gained powers to take action against sites hosting illegal content like the facilitation of suicide. Despite this, the site can still be easily accessed using a VPN, allowing vulnerable people to access potentially harmful content.  

“This report paints clear how repeated failures of the state to protect its vulnerable citizens mean that the nihilistic potential of a suicide forum has cost countless lives,” said Andy Burrows, the chief executive of Molly Rose Foundation. “It is inexplicable that Ofcom has left the fate of a forum that exists to groom and coerce others to end their lives in its own hands rather than take swift and decisive action to legally shut it down in the UK. Nothing less than a public inquiry is now needed to learn the countless lessons and act on them to save lives.”