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SNS signs of students suicide to be alerted via smart phones

In an effort to prevent students from committing suicide, the Korean government has decided to introduce a smart phone service that sends an alert message to parents when any words that are associated with committing suicide are used on the smart phone of their children. Some people, however, point out that it may not be as effective as expected since, knowing that their phones are monitored, students could be resistant to the service on their phones.

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On Friday, the government held the second ministerial meeting on public relations hosted by Deputy Minister for Public Relations Hwang Woo-yeo and announced prevention measures for students suicide. As more than 100 students are taking their lives every year, the government has come up with a desperate countermeasure to bring down the number to a double digit.

The Ministry of Education and the Korea Communications Commission have decided to launch a smart phone service that sends a message to parents phones when their children use suicide-related words on their phones for text messages, social network service such as Kakao Talk or Internet searching. The idea is that suicide-related words are added to Smart Assured Dream, a smart phone application that was previously introduced to alert any signs of school violence to parents.

The suicide prevention application can be used when both parents and their children install the application and approve the use of its service. However, it can cause a strong aversion among students as they could feel that their phones are watched. When they are using their own slang, the service could be useless. In fact, merely about 2,000 people have downloaded the Smart Assured Application since its introduction six months ago.

The education ministry plans to provide principals of primary, middle and high schools with trainings in suicide prevention and build up a relevant database by adopting a psychological autopsy on students who killed themselves.

Given the fact that most students choose a way of plunging to commit suicide (65.9 percent as of 2014) and more than 30 percent of them make their death leap from rooftops of apartment buildings, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has come up with a measure that locks all the doors to rooftops of multi-unit dwellings such as schools and apartments. According to the measure, the access to those rooftops areas are denied at ordinary times and it is mandatory to install automatic devices that allow the access in an emergency such as a fire. It is unknown, however, that how effective this countermeasure could be. It is also concerned that any malfunction of those automatic devices in the outbreak of fire could lead to even more dreadful disasters.

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