Mother’s grief over schoolgirl’s suicide puts Australia’s mental health support gaps under scrutiny
Rachelle Owen says the pain of losing her 12-year-old daughter is compounded by a harsher truth: someone at school may have known the child was
Rachelle Owen says the pain of losing her 12-year-old daughter is compounded by a harsher truth: someone at school may have known the child was in serious distress and never told her. Five years after Lauren died by suicide on Mother’s Day in 2021, the family’s story is drawing fresh attention as a 60 Minutes report probes how schools handle children in crisis.
Owen told the program she knew Lauren was struggling with bullying and school difficulties, but only after her death did she learn what the 12-year-old had disclosed to a school counsellor. Lauren had said she was hearing voices. The family says the school did not alert her mother.
Tapi itu baru awalnya.
A mother’s discovery in the records
Owen said the alarm bells went off when she later received snippets of police material that included school psychologist notes. “I … got snippets of the police report that had these school psychologist notes, and I was like: ‘hang on, this isn’t right. I didn’t know about this. What’s going on?’,” she said.
That discovery, she says, pointed to a failure that should never have happened. “How can you be a psychologist and sit there with a very unwell child and not do anything about it?” Owen said.
Lauren, known to family as “Loz,” had spent the final two years of her life dealing with bullying and depression, according to the family accounts shared in Australian media reports tied to the program. Her death on May 9, 2021, shook the Wagga community. A fundraising campaign later raised more than A$18,000 for the Rafferty family.
Questions over school support
The case lands in a wider debate over whether schools are equipped to identify and respond to young people at risk. In the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 24, and universities have expanded training to help staff and students spot warning signs. Ohio University, for example, has added suicide prevention sessions after noting that peers and loved ones are often the first to hear a student in trouble.
That theme echoes in school settings too, where counselors and teachers can be the first line of defense. But those systems depend on fast communication, clear referral pathways and adults who act when a child says something alarming. Without that, families can be left in the dark.
Lauren’s case is now being revisited in a television investigation because of what Owen says was missing when her daughter needed help most. The mother has already taken the New South Wales Department of Education to court, saying the records she later saw revealed how badly the system failed her child.
The questions are not going away. And for Owen, the next step is not closure. It is accountability — and whether other schools will be forced to reckon with what they do when a child says they are not safe.
