24
Teens: Cutting and Self-Injury
has suggested that this might be true, but most self-injury experts be-
lieve that the evidence is inconclusive. Janis Whitlock and Karen Rod-
ham write: “Although a small number of studies comparing Caucasian to
non-Caucasian youth show significantly higher rates among the former
. . . other studies show similarly high rates in minority samples.”
36
When Washington, DC, writer Janelle Harris learned that her
fifteen-year-old daughter had been cutting, she was devastated. “I turned
the corner in to her room and my eyes flew to a gash that ran up the middle
of her left thigh,” she says. “Blood oozed from it; she hovered over it in
tears. . . . It wasn’t the first time she’d
cut. She’s been doing it on and off
for more than two years. Other parts
of her body already bore the scars of
her need to release unspoken anxiety
and pain.” Along with feeling bro-
kenhearted over what her daughter
was doing to herself, Harris, who is
African American, was also shocked.
“Honestly,” she says, “it didn’t strike
me as something black folks do,
whatever that means.”
37
In talking with friends and acquaintances Harris found that many of
them shared her beliefs about self-harm and race. So she embarked upon
a research project and learned that those beliefs were erroneous; cutting
and other forms of self-injury were just as prevalent among black teens
as white teens. In fact, Harris read a major study from 2010 by British
researchers who found that black girls were even more likely to inten-
tionally hurt themselves than white girls. “It’s happening to more than
just my daughter,”
38
she says.
The study, which was published in the
British Journal of Psychiatry
in
September 2010, involved examining thousands of cases of people who
visited hospital emergency departments in three cities in England be-
tween 2001 and 2006. Of the 20,574 individuals who sought emergency
care for injuries related to self-harm, ethnicity data were available for
15,400. The researchers found that in all emergency departments in the
three cities, rates of self-harm were highest in young black females aged
sixteen to thirty-four. In the city of Manchester, for instance, the rate of
When Washington,
DC, writer Janelle
Harris learned that
her fifteen-year-
old daughter had
been cutting, she
was devastated.
“
”
