Editor’s Note: This article discusses suicide and might not be suitable for all audiences. If you or a loved one are in crisis or looking for help, you can speak with a trained listener by calling the suicide hotline at 988 or texting ‘Hello’ to 741741.

VIRGINIA ( DC News Now ) — One senator is pushing for answers after a group was accused of targeting teens in Virginia on the messaging platform Discord.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) released a letter on Monday pressing for Discord to address “violent predatory groups who target children with the goal of forcing them to end their own lives and live stream the act online.”

A teenager in Northern Virginia was one of many who had been targeted. Officials said that a group convinced her to try and end her own life on Discord.

Leslie, the teen’s mother, spoke with DC News Now about her family’s story. She also shared her story with Warner to inspire him to push for change.

She said her daughter, who is 18 now, did not get a smartphone until she graduated 8th grade. Then, after she got her first school-issued laptop in August, she noticed her daughter was self-harming.

“I was monitoring her all the time. I kept doing sneak attacks randomly, just trying to take her computer away, her school laptop to see what she was doing,” Leslie said.

She said her daughter’s online activity escalated, starting with anorexia group chats on Reddit, and then turning into nearly 100 group chats on the app Discord, some of which had explicit, violent and disturbing content of self-harm and suicide.

“It was kids, taking pictures of their self-harm, kids cutting all over their arms and on their legs and people saying, ‘That’s beautiful,'” Leslie said. “‘Cut more, take pictures, do it tonight, and let me see it in the morning.'”

“She was 14 at the time. And then it went to, ‘Go kill yourself. These are the ways that you can do it,'” she said.

In March of 2020, Leslie said her daughter attempted suicide. First responders arrived at the family’s home in the middle of the night – her daughter called 911 herself.

“We woke up, my husband and I, at 4 a.m. with police and EMT in our house telling us her daughter overdosed, and I had to go to the hospital immediately with them, and I thought it was a nightmare,” she said. “I thought I was dreaming.”

Leslie said four years later, her daughter is “stabilized.” She has since finished a year of college and has received help through a psychiatric hospital stay and therapy. Now, she is pushing for change so no other family goes through what she and her daughter endured.

“My daughter almost died because [Discord] didn’t protect her,” she said. “They didn’t have the most basic protections for her. I had no place to report anything. It was all on me. It shouldn’t be this way.”

You can read Warner’s full letter and Discord’s statement responding to the letter below.

Letter from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)

Statement from Discord

We created Discord to be the best place for people to hang out and talk together around playing their favorite games. In order to achieve this mission, we know that Discord must, first and foremost, be a safe space for our users. That’s why safety is integrated into every aspect of our product and policies.

These groups and actions are horrendous. They have no place on Discord, or in society as a whole. Discord was the first platform to proactively detect and report one of these groups to law enforcement, and we haven’t stopped fighting them, and groups like them, since. We have highly skilled teams who work relentlessly to combat these predators, coordinate closely with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and, where appropriate, provide information to law enforcement to eradicate this behavior on our platform and across the internet.

We welcome Senator Warner’s letter and his questions. Congress’s partnership on this important issue is essential to stop these criminals and make the internet safer for everyone.

Discord Spokesperson

If you or a loved one are in crisis or looking for help, you can speak with a trained listener by calling the suicide hotline at 988 or texting ‘Hello’ to 741741.

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