Thousands March to Honor Teen Suicide Victim of School Bullying in Mulhouse, France

The emotion was strong on Sunday in Mulhouse. Some 1,400 people (parents, family, friends, teachers, middle and high school students) marched through the streets of the city center to pay tribute to Dinah, a 14-year-old high school student in the second grade, who committed suicide by hanging in the night of October 4 to 5. According to her relatives, she was the victim of school bullying from young girls she met in college to whom she had revealed her homosexuality. "My daughter was harassed for two years, and for two years we did everything we could to make it stop, but they pursued her to her home, to social networks," lamented her mother, originally from Morocco.

"Don’t worry, you’ll be dead soon," or "we’ll send you links on the internet so you can die." According to her mother, these are the messages Dinah received after a first suicide attempt in March. The victim is mixed-race and suffered "racist or homophobic" insults, her father, of Reunionese origin, told AFP. In her class, there were two students who supported her, the others "brought her down."

"Justice for Dinah," "words hurt, words kill," or "never again," chanted some participants in this march. "In schools, we are increasingly confronted with this type of situation. It often starts over trifles and then it escalates, especially because of social networks," testified Fatimah Aguilar, a teacher in a high school and mother of four children, who came to the march with one of her daughters. "I didn’t know Dinah, but it’s as if it happened to one of my friends," said Inès Dalhi, 18, a senior student at another school in the city.

The justice system has finally taken this case seriously. An investigation for "search for the causes of death" has already been opened, says the Mulhouse public prosecutor, Edwige Roux-Morizot. According to her, bullying is "a hypothesis".