What are we to make of this? Some 25% of American high school
girls have engaged in self-harming behaviors. That includes cutting themselves
and burning themselves. For boys, the number is around 10%.
No one knows what to make of these statistics, but clearly,
the kids are not alright.
The New York Times has the story:
Up to
30 percent of teenage girls in some parts of the United States say they have intentionally injured themselves without
aiming to commit suicide, researchers have found.
About
one in four adolescent girls deliberately harmed herself in the previous year,
often by cutting or burning, compared to about one in 10 boys.
For those who want to know, the data come from 2015… making
it far more difficult to blame it on our current president.
We know precious little about what is causing this, but it has become so prevalent that researchers believe that it is becoming a norm. Among the
explanations, they offer this:
Adolescent
girls who participated in the survey were more likely than boys to report
belonging to the L.G.B.T. community and having been sexually assaulted or
bullied online. But males were more likely to report smoking and using drugs.
All of those factors were at least somewhat linked with purposeful injury.
In the realm of wild speculations, how much of the problem
is a side effect of the appalling adolescent practice of sexting? How many
girls have been induced to send pictures of their naked bodies to boys they
barely know, only to be abused and bullied by other children in school.
As for the sexual assaults, are children being induced to
experiment with sex and drugs when they are too young to handle the fallout? Are they allowed to run wild? Do they lack for serious parental supervision.
As
for the LGBT angle, I had thought that we as a nation had become more tolerant
of sexual preferences. We encourage young people to declare their sexual
orientation openly and honestly. How does it happen that, in a woke culture, this new custom ends up hurting children?
I don't know what's going on, but not sure if things are getting worse, or just reported more. There's lots I don't understand, things that are not secret self-harm, but seemingly destructive - binge drinking, smoking, drugs, tattoos, piercings, and generally jumping off bridges because your friends are doing it. Let's not forget the tide pod challenge, etc, right, even if it started fake, some kids are clearly brain damaged before they started doing these things.
ReplyDeleteOne explanation would be standard teen rebellion, but I thought modern parents were overly permissive, which leaves less to rebel against. A desire for fame and celebrity might be another explanation, and YouTube as the enabler. Shooting 1500 basketballs over your head to get one for YouTube seems harmless, but sniffing condoms up your nose so you'll get more "views" of you being cool, I'll never understand a desire for that sort of infamy.
"I don't know what's going on...."
ReplyDeleteCapitan Obvio strikes again.