Stand By Me

‘Tomorrow’s going to be a rough day. Stand by me.’

These were among the last words 14-year-old schoolgirl Mia Janin said to her friend in a WhatsApp voice note in the early hours of March 12, 2021.

Mia never saw tomorrow.

At 6:50 in the morning, her parents discovered her lifeless body at their Barnet family residence.

Mia, a year 10 pupil at the Jewish Free School (JFS) in Kenton, north-west London, took her own life after months of relentless bullying by male pupils, a coroner ruled yesterday.

Her heartbroken family has revealed the harrowing voice message she sent to a friend the night before she was due to return to school.

‘Tomorrow’s going to be a rough day,’ said Mia through tears in the message, which was shared with BBC London.

‘Stand by me. I’m taking deep breaths. In and out.

‘I’m currently mentally preparing myself to get bullied tomorrow.’

At the end of yesterday’s inquest, Mia’s distraught father, Mariano Janin, declared that his daughter had been “failed” by the “people who were meant to keep her safe.”

She was the target of a demeaning boys-only Snapchat group, and she was the victim of a violent campaign of bullying by male students both at school and online, according to evidence presented at this week’s inquest.

Yesterday at Barnet Coroner’s Court, coroner Tony Murphy of the North London district decided that Mia ‘took her life while still a child and while still in the process of evolving into maturity’.

Mr Murphy said Mia was last seen alive at about 10 pm on March 11 2021, when she said goodnight to her parents in their family home.

She was found hanged by her parents at about 6.50 am on March 12 2021. Two undated letters in Mia’s handwriting were found on her bed addressed to ‘her loving family and friends’, which ‘explained that Mia decided to end her life’.

Mr Murphy added before his conclusion that Mia had ‘close friends, including at her secondary school, but she also experienced bullying from some male students’.

He added that neither Mia’s family nor teachers were aware of that before her death.

Sadly, Marisa Janin, Mia’s mother, passed away from an aneurysm a few months after her daughter.

Speaking after the inquest, Mr Janin told reporters, ‘Nothing will bring back my wife and my daughter Mia. For almost three years, we have sought answers for the loss of Mia.

It did greatly hurt me to read about this. At school, bullying occurs frequently, yet little is done to stop it. Although schools claim to have anti-bullying policies in place, they are unaware of what occurs.

Seeing bullies continue to have an impact on people’s lives without taking responsibility is depressing. The suffering they cause us doesn’t just go away as we age; it remains with us forever.

Bullying stays with a person forever. They relive those memories over and over again. They can never regain themselves fully, never mind the ongoing anxiety.

Bullying needs to be recognised as a crime, especially by junior and senior students, because the pain that it causes is forever enduring.

She was a young, beautiful girl, and this was a hard article to write, but then any article about children is hard to write about.

This young girl had her whole life ahead of her, and I can’t even imagine how her father must be feeling, especially as his wife also died as well.

Bullies in schools have always existed, but the bullying that occurs in this day and age is on a completely different level because of social media and the internet.

The government should forbid children from using social media until they are at least 20 years old. Bullying would still occur, of course, but it should be made illegal by extremely strict legislation; otherwise, children would be able to get away with bullying, which is a crime that has to be punished. If you lock them in a police cell for an hour or so, they may reconsider what they did.