High female suicide rates: ecological fallacy or sad reality?

Yip & Liu (2006) present a demographic perspective of female suicide in China, the only country in which the suicide rate is higher among women than men. However, this reversed gender representation also exists in certain communities in other countries. In the Indian subcontinent suicide rates are higher in men than in women but the difference is lower than in most countries: the male:female suicide ratio in India is 1.3:1 (Cheng & Lee, 2000). Suicide among immigrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain was higher among young married women than men (Soni Raleigh et al, 1990). Tadros & Salib (2006) also reported that significantly more Asian women than Asian men killed themselves in Birmingham and Solihull, a clearly reversed gender ratio compared with suicide in the White population and in other ethnic groups in Birmingham and the UK as a whole.

Suicide terrorism is not an egoistic suicide but none the less is a form of fatal self-harm in the legal and human sense and has a distinct underlying political, individual and social logic. The support of and acceptance by the attackers' own communities ensure an endless supply of volunteers who seek ‘voluntary violent death’ in a bizarre act of so-called martyrdom, in order to promote what they firmly believe to be a just cause. Women carried out 15% (64) of such attacks over the past 25 years (Pope, 2005). Chechen women carried out 60% of all suicide bombings in Russia and 70% of such attacks were executed by Kurdish women in Turkey (Pope, 2005). There is also a high proportion of women suicide bombers in the Tamil Tigers (30%). al Qa'ida, which associates itself with Islamic fundamentalism, never used female suicide attackers from its formation in 1993 until the tragic attack in Jordan in 2005.

In general, women are at a lower risk of suicide than men and a protective effect of child-bearing in terms of suicide risk has been postulated (Catalan, 2000). This does not appear to apply to female suicide bombers or to some countries and cultures in which gender representation in suicide is reversed. A higher female:male suicide ratio is not unique to China. The significantly higher rate of female suicide observed outside China is not an ‘ecological fallacy’ but a sad reality.