James Kirkup James Kirkup

The BBC should be ashamed of its reporting on trans teenagers

(Getty images)

This is an article about some difficult, complex subjects: suicide, mental health, support for transgender children. It’s also about something very simple: a horrible failure of journalism by the BBC.

I’ll come to the BBC in due course, but given that this is about the potential for self-harm among young people, I think it’s important to take some time to offer some context and background facts.

The first thing to do is to note the longstanding advice to the media from the Samaritans on how to report responsibly on the issue of suicide, in order to avoid the risk of adversely influencing the behaviour of vulnerable people.

‘Steer clear of presenting suicidal behaviour as an understandable response to a crisis or adversity. This can contribute to unhelpful and risky normalising of suicide as an appropriate response to distress.’

And:

‘Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.’

Next, I think readers should consider a statement made in 2018 by the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, the UK’s main centre of treatment for gender-variant children:

‘Suicidality in young people attending the GIDS is similar to that of young people referred to child and adolescent mental health services. It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition.’

A third data point comes from a High Court judgement made earlier this month. It concerned the Tavistock clinic’s use of puberty-blocking medication on children who experience trouble over their gender. The Tavistock lost the case, as the judges decided children could not give informed consent to such treatment, the use of which has now been halted by NHS England.

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