Forced suicide is a method of execution where the victim is coerced into committing suicide to avoid facing an alternative option they perceive as much worse, such as suffering torture or having friends or family members imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Another common form historically has been deliberately providing a condemned individual with a weapon and a brief period in which to commit honourable suicide if he or she chooses before being executed. Because the victim's cause of death would be registered as suicide, the act also carries an additional benefit as black propaganda against individuals for whom an open execution would generate unwanted attention due to the suicide's position or influence.
Read more about Forced Suicide: In Ancient Greece and Rome, In Asia, In Modern Europe, As A Substitute For Honor Killings
Famous quotes containing the words forced and/or suicide:
“I do not like forced integration.... I do not like forced anything.... as a youngster I lived in a white neighborhood with a white neighbor next door. We would go to them, they would go to us. If they had anything, we had it. We lived just like one. We didn’t think about no integration.”
—Ruby Middleton Forsythe (b. 1905)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)