French parents unite to sue TikTok over ‘how-to’ suicide videos

French families who lost their children have taken the first joint legal action in Europe against the Chinese-owned app.

Charlize Dapui Parkiet with her mother, Delphine Dapui. Charlize took her own life at the age of 15.

Charlize Dapui Parkiet was a happy, loving child. She liked Harry Potter and synchronised swimming and lived with an elder sister, her parents and two cats in a comfortable home on a hill with a goldfish pond and a view of Nice below, on the French Riviera.

One afternoon last November, she took her own life. She was 15.

“We’ll carry the pain for the rest of our lives,” Delphine Dapui, her mother, said. Jeremy Parkiet, her father, who found her body in her bedroom, said: “I’ve replayed the scene in my head so many times, living it over and over. Would it have changed something if we had acted differently?”

The question torments them.

Charlize’s friends told her parents that on the eve of her death she had reposted a video online in which a woman gives instructions on a method of suicide.

The parents were barely aware of TikTok, the video-sharing app, or the fact that Charlize spent hours every week on it. Now they have joined six other families in what is thought to be the first joint legal action in Europe against the Chinese-owned company which they blame for the death.

“TikTok say ‘we just circulate the videos’, that they are not responsible for what’s in them, but they can’t carry on like that; they must take responsibility,” Laure Boutron-Marmion, the group’s lawyer in Paris, said. She expects other families to join the case for which she is gathering evidence before filing a lawsuit this northern summer.

“There are medical studies showing the link between these self-harm videos and the poor state of mental health among adolescents,” she said, adding that she would demand “significant” compensation for the plaintiffs.

These include the parents of seven adolescents. Three, among them Charlize and 15-year-old Marie from nearby Cassis, killed themselves. Others suffer from mental illness or have survived suicide attempts. One is in hospital and refusing care.

TikTok would not comment on the lawsuit but said it had “clear and strict” guidelines on content. “We don’t allow anything that depicts self harm or anything in that realm,” a spokeswoman said. “Anything that slips through is removed as quickly as possible. It’s an area we take really seriously.”

Molly Russell, from London, was 14 when she committed suicide in 2017 after viewing harmful content on social media.

The stories of these French teenagers are similar to that of Molly Russell, 14, from Harrow, London, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content on social media.

A coroner at her 2022 inquest concluded that material she viewed online had “affected her mental health in a negative way and contributed to her death in a more than minimal way”.

Charlize’s parents believe she suffered the same fate, as much a victim of a powerful algorithm bombarding her with videos about suicide as she was of her depression.

She was named after the Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron, “but our girl was even prettier”, said Ms Dapui, 47. Mr Parkiet, 44, who runs a body jewellery and piercing business in Nice, said Charlize had been a “smiley and joyful” child as well as “hypersensitive” to the extent that she had “agonised about stepping on ants”.

On a bookshelf in here bedroom were several volumes of Heartstopper, the romantic coming-of-age series by the British author Alice Oseman, but the telephone Charlize was given when she was 12 ended up claiming more of her attention than books.

“We really had no idea what she was looking at on the phone,” said her mother. “When we found out, it was too late.”

At first Charlize seemed happy enough at her private school down the road. “She took up synchronised swimming, which she really liked; she was doing judo too,” said Ms Dapui. “Her grades were good,” added Mr Parkiet.

At one point she started complaining about harassment by a classmate. Then came the first suicide attempt. “She came into our room in the middle of the night,” recalled Mr Parkiet. “We rushed her to emergency. She spent a week in the hospital.”

Charlize’s mental health deteriorated. By now she was seeing a psychiatrist who told her parents that she was self-harming and had an eating disorder. She made a second and third attempt on her life.

She was taken off antidepressants in favour of a form of psychotherapy known as EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), used to process trauma such as the loss of her grandfather with whom she had a close relationship.

The new therapy seemed to work. “We felt a difference,” Mr Parkiet said. “She took up swimming again,” Ms Dapui said.

On the afternoon of November 22, Mr Parkiet took Ylana, Charlize’s elder sibling, to an appointment, telling Charlize they would not be gone long. Returning just over an hour later, Mr Parkiet found her dead.

Ms Dapui and her husband torture themselves with thoughts of what they could have done or said to save her.

Most of all, though, they regret not having been aware, until it was too late, of the self-harming videos that their daughter was watching online.

“It’s the same with looking up recipes and things like that; if you look at one video about something you’re soon bombarded with the stuff,” Ms Dapui said. “That’s what was happening to our daughter.”

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14

THE SUNDAY TIMES