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How Serious a Problem Are Cutting and Self-Injury Among Teens?
conducted every four years since 1983. Tens of thousands of youth, aged
eleven, thirteen, and fifteen, from more than forty countries are asked
questions about their health and well-being, social environments, health-
related behaviors, and risk-related behaviors.
In all the years the survey was conducted no
questions about self-harm were included. Eng-
land became the first country to include ques-
tions about self-harm during the 2013–2014
survey. This was based on reports from teachers
in secondary schools throughout England who
noticed a significant increase in self-harming
behavior among their students. Their concerns
were confirmed in the survey, which found that
20 percent of fifteen-year-olds had self-harmed
over the past year. This was a significant increase
over the 6.9 percent reported during the last
comprehensive study, which was published in
the
British Medical Journal
in 2002. According
to Brooks, the 2013–2014 survey also found that
self-harming behavior was much more prevalent
among older teenage girls. “Our findings are re-
ally worrying,” she says, “and it’s . . . considerably worse among girls.”
34
One teenager from England who has injured herself since she was
twelve years old is a girl named Grace. She used scissors and razor blades
and at first cut only her wrists. Then her need to self-harm worsened,
and she began cutting all the way up her left arm and the tops of both
thighs. “I was hurting myself once a week or even more,” says Grace.
“Sometimes it was once a month.” She explains the short-lived positive
effects of cutting. “It calmed me down but then I’d immediately wish I
hadn’t done it as it hurts and you need to hide it.”
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Although Grace was
finally able to stop cutting she still has deep scars from years of doing it.
Whenever she is around people she does not know very well, she wears
clothing that covers the scars so they are not visible.
Racial Disparity?
In the past many researchers were convinced that self-harm was practiced
by Caucasian teens far more often than minority teens. Some research
One es-
pecially
promising
discovery
was that
worldwide
incidence of
self-injury
among ado-
lescents
does not
seem to be
increasing.
“
”
