Women get the blame for everything. No wonder self-harm in girls is rising | Cerys Howell
So self-harm too, it seems, is a women’s issue. Along with anorexia, bulimia and every other self-destructive behaviour going. A University of Manchester study published this week in the British Medical Journal found that self-harm among girls is soaring. While the rate of self-harm among boys has stayed roughly the same, among 13- to 16-year-old girls it has increased by 68% in the last three years. Self-harm is three times more common for 10- to 19-year-old girls than boys. This is a significant finding, particularly given that self-harmers are 17 times more likely to die from suicide, and 34 times more likely to die from drug or alcohol poisoning.
Self-harm doesn’t always get the sympathy or attention it deserves. At some point, a compassionless person decided it was about “attention-seeking”, and this absolved everybody except the self-harming child of responsibility. The myth embedded itself in our collective understanding of an unwanted phenomenon, and became another weapon to bolster the classic adult response to child misbehaviour, that goes along the lines: “just ignore them - they’ll soon stop doing it.” Working well, isn’t it?
But self-harm is a widely documented and clinically understood strategy that both children and adults employ to deal with trauma, dissociation, inability (or rather, ill-equipment) to communicate anger, and unbearable emotional turmoil. When emotion becomes overwhelming, children are the least equipped in society to deal with it, as most of them don’t know how to communicate their pain, and may feel powerless over their adult-run environment. If we had sensible social policies, we would make sure children were the most equipped to deal with emotion, given the hormonal-emotional turbulence that is childhood. We would give them every self-help strategy available, as they do in Denmark, where the mandatory, national Step-by-Step programme teaches pre-school children to identify and understand their emotions and show compassion to themselves and their peers.
But there is the gender question, too. When I saw a therapist about my own self-harming in the years following sexual abuse as a child, she told me that self-harm is “anger turned inwards”. This, I later learned, is an idea commonly used by the therapeutic profession, and many psychologists will attest to the prevalence of anger-turned-inwards as a coping strategy among girls in particular. While boys (and no, not all boys, but far more than girls) are better at externalising their pain – throwing chairs, setting fire to things, hitting each other, and all those deflective actions that girls would be far better off employing than cutting their own arms – girls turn their anger in on themselves, expressing their pain in quiet, desperate ways.
I wonder who taught them to do that? Could it be the kind of society that sells “boys will be boys” clothing, while turning girls into self-abnegating little carers, by targeting them with dolls and ovens? Could it be the gossip, far and wide, that transfers the blame for any man’s failings on to his wife, or his ex-wife? Could it be the voices everywhere whispering that if a woman was assaulted or harassed at work, she might just have done something to deserve it? Why was she wearing that, anyway? And if she kept quiet about it, doesn’t she have any self-respect? And if she spoke out about it, doesn’t she have any self-respect?
Women and girls are the repository of blame for almost everything that goes wrong in our society. How often, when a man fails, do we hear it turned back on a woman? Women are not only the overwhelming victims of sexual violence, as we have seen from the phenomenal outpourings of the #MeToo hashtag and the hard evidence; but when they are raped or attacked, it is somehow their fault. The old feminist saying goes: “If we get raped it’s our fault, and if we get bashed we must have provoked it, and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches.” For women and girls, this is the rub. We can never win, and that leaves us feeling powerless.
The social blaming of women impacts every girl, not just the woman who is individually blamed. When Hillary Clinton is blamed for enabling Harvey Weinstein, the message to other women and girls is that it’s not just her fault, but it is your fault. This is the subtext. And children understand subtext very clearly, whether they can express it or not. The self-harming of our daughters – the anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating, cutting, drinking and crying in bedrooms behind closed doors - is the logical consequence. The fact is, we will never have girls who love and cherish themselves if we continue to burden them with failings that are hardly ever theirs.
• Cerys Howell is a freelance writer and PhD candidate