On a humid Monday morning in late May, Lam Po-yin gathered her 4-year-old daughter in her arms and leapt with her from the window of their 17th floor apartment in Tung Chung to the ground below.

Astonishingly, cushioned by the embrace, Leung Ka-yee survived as they first hit a first-floor podium before bouncing onto a covered walkway and then falling to the ground. She was found sobbing in her dead mother's arms.

The shocking incident is the latest in a series of cases in Hong Kong in which parents have committed or attempted to commit suicide and taken their young children with them. Although such cases account for only a handful of the city's 1,000 suicides a year, they are on the rise.

"The number of cases has been much more than we usually observe," said Paul Yip, director of the University of Hong Kong Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention. "Usually we have only one or two cases, but last year, we had four or five cases of adults dying with children in the first six months of the year alone."

Extremes of emotion drive parents to attempt to die with their children, Yip said. "Studies show that some people do it out of love and some out of hatred," he said.

"With hatred, it is when they find their spouse has had an extramarital affair, for example, and they want to die with the children as a way of punishing the spouse.

"When they do it out of love, they think that if they die, the young child will not be well looked after by other people. They think it is best to stay with them. It is not right, of course, but they really think what they are doing is for the good of the child.

"These people suffer from cognitive difficulties. Most people know children are not property and you cannot decide whether they live or die. But for them, at that point in time, they really think they are doing something good for their children."

Yip said he believed the root cause of the trend was the breakdown of the family. "The number of divorces in Hong Kong has gone up from around 2,000 in the 1980s to 17,000 last year," he said.

"A lot of people who commit suicide come from a broken family, or they are a single parent or they are in a family with a great deal of disharmony.

"Empowerment of the family is the best insurance cover for the future. I think it is very important if the society is going to function we have to have functioning family. If most families are dysfunctional the whole society will not function well.

"There are lots of situations today where parents work long hours to support the family and children are left at home unattended. It is not conducive to promoting a harmonious family. I think it is time for the Hong Kong government to invest more in family affairs."

Simon Parry

(HK Edition 07/08/2010 page2)