Laura Dekker, the teenage girl hoping to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world, ran away to the Caribbean last year because she wanted to avoid causing her family pain, the AD quotes her as saying on Thursday.

The pressure from two groups of social workers and the media was so great that her family feared she might become suicidal, the paper says.
‘The period before I decided to run away to St Maarten and I had cut at my wrists was the most difficult,’ the paper quotes the girl, now 15, as saying.
‘I did not want to hurt others so I hurt myself. And for a moment I had the feeling I wanted to die. But, you know, I did not want to do that to my family. So the choice was death or to go: it was St Maarten.’
The interview coincides with the publication of Dekker’s life story written by herself and her grandmother.
The courts cleared the way for Dekker to make the trip at the end of July. She is currently in the Canary Islands, waiting for the end of the hurricane season.