Kazakh Children Protest After Skirt-Wearing Schoolboy's Suicide

ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A group of schoolchildren in Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty, have staged a protest after an eighth grader at another school committed suicide following his meeting with a psychologist for coming to school in a skirt.

Dozens of boys came to school in skirts on October 29 under the banner "Clothes do not have gender."

A day earlier, media reports said that a boy had committed suicide by jumping from a high-rise building after he wore a skirt as a joke at an event devoted to the characters of the Harry Potter books.

The reports said that the boy killed himself after a school official forced him to meet a school psychiatrist questioning his decision to wear a skirt.

The administration of the Nazarbaev Intellectual School in Almaty where the boy studied confirmed "the fact of an accident involving a schoolboy during out-of-school time on October 27."

The Almaty city police department said that investigation had been launched into a possible “incitement to suicide."

A spokesperson for the school, Zhanar Adambaeva, told RFE/RL that there was no homophobia at the school and there was no pressure on the boy from school officials.

However, boys and girls at the school wrote on social media networks that the boy committed suicide after he was forcibly taken to the school's psychiatrist over the skirt.