Self-harm is not just attention-seeking: it’s time to talk openly about the issue

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attention-seeking, Bullying, causes, emotional distress, emotional pain, emotions, isolation, obsessions, pain, physical pain, professional help, relief, secret, self-harm, stress, teenagers, young people

Self-harm is not just attention-seeking: it’s time to talk openly about the issue

Three years ago, with her parents and sisters out for dinner, then-13-year-old Lucy found herself alone in her family’s Lincolnshire home. Dressed in her pink Tinker Bell pyjamas, she began to make herself a cup of tea. Then she spotted an object on the kitchen counter that immediately diverted her attention. “Shall I do it?” Lucy asked herself. “Will it stop the pain?”

For Lucy, now 17, that evening marked the start of a two-and-a-half year struggle with self-harm. Two weeks before, she had been brutally attacked and raped (which she now describes as “the incident”). At the time, anxious they wouldn’t believe her, Lucy never fully revealed to anyone what had happened. In her mind, she tried to repress the rape. She began shutting herself in her bedroom. She told her parents she was feeling unwell. Physical pain, she decided, was the only way to purge her pent-up emotional pain.

“When you keep all your problems in, it feels like you’re screaming inside,” Lucy says. “But when you cut or burn yourself, the pain is more physical. You feel like you’re releasing that scream. After a few months, self-harming became part of my daily routine.”

Eventually, both at school or at home, Lucy was self-harming four times a day. She wore black jeans, black tops and even black gloves to conceal her scars. “I pushed everyone everyone away” Lucy says. “I stopped caring about school. My grades suffered. Self-harm became a real obsession. It took over my life.”

Today, having made a huge effort to stop, Lucy has not self-harmed for more than six months. But self-harm is still on the rise among the UK’s young population. Data published last year by a collaborate study from England Health Behaviour in School Aged Children (HBSC) revealed that up to one in five 15-year-olds across the country self-harm. During the past decade, according to the same study, there has been a three-fold increase in the total number of UK teenagers self-harming.

What drives young people to self-harm? Therapist Jenna Mutlick, who has a personal experience of it, says it is usually some form of “self-punishment”. People believe they have done something wrong – even when they haven’t – and then feel they deserve the pain. “I know a few people who self-harm because they are bullied and eventually come to believe that they then deserve to be bullied,” she says. “When you self-harm, it is so hard to escape from the [mental] space that you are in.”

“It’s a very heterogeneous group of people who self-harm, and there are a variety of reasons why people might start,” says Professor Glyn Lewis, head of psychiatry at University College London. “Clearly, there are people who self-harm because they want to take their own lives, but there are also people who want to self-harm because they are in difficult situations or want to relieve stress.

“As a long-term strategy, of course, self-harm is not very effective,” he adds, “but people do report that they get some form of relief from upsetting thoughts or emotions. Some forms of self-harm are obviously very dangerous, but there’s a continuum. Some people may only scratch themselves very superficially, for example, which won’t do any long-lasting damage.”

The causes of self-harm are likely to be complex, even if the person harming does not see the issues in that way. Kieran, from Glasgow, began self-harming after five years of “constant” physical and verbal bullying at school. His parents split up when he was seven, though he says it was the bullying – which still torments him today – that incited his self-harming. “The bullying made me feel really unbalanced,” says Kieran, now 23. “I started to self-harm when I was aged 11, and it kind of just snowballed from there. I stopped eating. I isolated myself from a lot of my friends and family. I kept it a secret for almost a decade.”

Like Lucy, Kieran says that self-harming became a secret obsession. The bullying made him feel “physically and mentally numb”. Self-harm, by contrast, made Kieran feel more alive, and he would regularly self-harm in his bedroom at night. “It brought me out of my slumber,” he says. “It made me feel normal, and I became addicted to doing it for that reason.” He says that the self-harm was like an “adrenaline shot” that brings everything back into focus.”

Kieran admits that he still has a “daily battle” with self-harm. He is significantly better than he was a few years ago, though, when he would harm himself up to 400 times in one evening. “It’s a high level of emotional distress that causes people to resort to self-harming,” he says. “People sometimes feel like they can’t cope with their emotion. It’s how they cope with life’s daily stresses.”

Chris Leaman, from the UK mental health charity YoungMinds, says it is still very much a taboo subject in British society. “Every year, we work with Childline, YouthNet and selfharmUK to try and combat these sort of stigmas for Self-Harm Awareness Day,” he says. “There is a definite problem around young men not feeling like they can talk about their issues, which can make self-harm quite a common issue among them.”

“Some people do talk about self-harm quite openly, but that’s relatively unusual,” says Professor Glyn Lewis. “A lot of people conceal self-harming behaviour from their friends and family. There are not necessarily signs to look out for; it’s more a case of often asking people how they are feeling, and keeping communication open with them. As a rule, families and friends concerned about someone self-harming always should talk to the person themselves and encourage them to seek professional help.”

Statistically, teenage girls are still more than twice as likely to self-harm than young males, and this has helped create another gender-based stigma: that self-harming girls are simply seeking attention. Fiona Brooks, professor of adolescent and child health at the University of Hertfordshire, who led the investigations for last year’s HBSC report, identifies this as a prevalent problem. “Nowadays, young people are in a much more uncertain world than before,” she says. “Instead of self-harming just being dismissed as attention seeking, it’s something that needs to be taken seriously. Equally, if young girls are self-harming for attention, that’s a different matter that needs to be taken just as seriously.”

Lucy thinks back on that evening she started self-harming, and wishes that she could tell herself to stop – and talk to someone. Talking, like with most former self-harmers, has been a significant part of Lucy’s recovery, but she also credits her own determination as a decisive factor. “If you don’t want to stop, you won’t,” she says. “In the end, a lot of it comes down to how you see yourself. I used to feel people were always judging me, but now I feel I don’t care what they think. Why should I let them control my happiness?”

Facing up to rape: Victim speaks out about the ‘faceless’ crime

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anxiety, attention-seeking, awareness, educate, embarrassment, fear, humiliation, powerlessness, rape, report, sexual assault, sexual harassment, Sexual Violence, shame, stigma, violated

Facing up to rape: Victim speaks out about the ‘faceless’ crime

Up until two weeks ago, Francesca Ebel had never told anyone in her family – or indeed most of her friends – that she had been raped. Yet she has now gone public, and the response has been overwhelming.

There were no dark alleys or threats of knives. There were no dodgy areas of town or even strangers involved. And that’s the whole point, explains the 20-year-old student, who is in her first year of studying Russian and French at Cambridge University.

“It happened three years ago. I was 17 and at a party. I got drunk and so friends helped me up the stairs and into bed. It was there that I was awoken by a crashing noise and burst of white light. I realised that someone was wrenching back the duvet and clambering on top of me, frantically pressing his lips to mine. Then my legs were pulled apart and I felt a sudden, tearing pain.”

Even in her drunken stupor, Francesca knew instinctively that something was very wrong and tried to shove him off. She even said “No”. More than once. “But he ignored me, breathing heavily in my ear.”

When it was over, Francesca stumbled outside, to find him smoking and laughing with his friends, and in the days afterwards, he boasted and joked about their sexual encounter.

Suspecting that she would be branded, at least by some, as an attention-seeker and a liar, she did not accuse him of rape. In fact, even when she confided in a close friend, it didn’t occur to her to use the word rape. “How could I claim to have been raped when ‘rape’ conjures up such violent images? How could my experience possibly parallel brutalities such as gang-rapes in India? It was unthinkable. Mine was not a violent rape; my rapist’s motives were not hateful or destructive. Furthermore, I felt embarrassed, ashamed and humiliated. So I put it behind me and got on with my life.”

And to a large extent, she succeeded. “Thankfully, my enjoyment of sex has not been affected and I’ve flourished in functional relationships. So how could I even begin to claim to identify with other victims’ experiences?” she says.

But about a year ago, when Francesca was in a relationship with a lawyer, she told him what had happened. “He stared at me and said: ‘You do realise that that is legally rape. You said no and that you didn’t want it to happen’. It was the first time I saw things clearly.”

Shortly afterwards, Francesca started university and was struck by how many other women, including a close friend, talked about similar experiences – something that certainly doesn’t surprise Rape Crisis, the charity, which claims that an estimated 90 per cent of those who experience sexual violence know the perpetrator in some way.

“There was a major survey that came out last month, which found that more than one in 13 women at Cambridge University had been sexually assaulted and that the vast majority – 88 per cent – did not report it,” Francesca says. “The study got people talking about their own experiences.”

According to the survey, women at the university are routinely groped, molested and raped. Like Francesca, one of the rape victims explained that she did not report her attacker because she thought that nothing would come of it. “I have no reason to believe that my report will be taken seriously, be investigated or result in a conviction. On the contrary, I have every reason to believe that he would be acquitted,” the woman stated. A couple of weeks later, an article appeared in the Cambridge Tab – of which Francesca is news editor – on what to do if you are raped. “We had run a few anonymous stories of sexual assault in our publication, but this one, which was written by the brother of a rape victim, really got to me, because it listed all of the things that I wish I’d done at the beginning. Suddenly, I just felt sick of this feeling of frustration, powerlessness and stigma about what had happened to me and so many others, and I felt a need to speak out. So I did.

“By storing the incident up inside me, I had let it gnaw away at me – the questions, anxieties and fury had built up to a level which was almost intolerable,” she explains. “And perhaps most critically of all, I wanted to turn a negative experience into something constructive.”

Francesca’s article appeared in the next issue, on 17 May, titled “There are people behind recent rape statistics and you must take their stories seriously”. What followed the headline was a candid, honest and brave account of her own experience, together with a plea for readers to recognise that behind stories of rape and sexual harassment, there are people who have to carry on with their lives and come to terms with what has happened, no matter how violent or “ordinary” their experience.

“Rape can happen to anyone at any time and I hoped that my story would demonstrate that,” she explains. “I also wanted to shed some light on why it is so hard to report an incident, and finally, I want to educate and initiate. Rape is not just confined to shady, impoverished corners of the globe; and it has to stop.”

It would have been far easier to write it anonymously, she admits. “Speaking out about rape has its consequences, not just for the person themselves, but for their family and friends. But there are too many faceless victims. I wanted to put a face to a story that has happened to so many people. I’m not disparaging anonymity in any way, but it does depersonalise the issue and I think that, as a result, people often don’t realise that rape is so common.”

Almost instantly, the article went viral, having had more than 28,000 views so far. Francesca has also been inundated with private letters and comments online, mostly from women who tell similar stories.

“It has been chilling to see the same story told again and again, and they all say the same thing – that they were full of self-doubt and fear of being labelled as an attention-seeker or that they wouldn’t be believed. Many, like me, don’t see themselves as a victim or the incident as defining them, but it has nonetheless affected them hugely.”

The responses also revealed just how frightened people are of reporting it. “Many of the women explained how they couldn’t face the trauma of the very system that is meant to protect us.”

Others wondered if it would even get to court – and with just 6 per cent of cases reported to police ultimately ending in a conviction, according to Rape Crisis, who can blame them?

“For reasons I can’t express even to myself, I have no current plans to report my case,” Francesca says. “But actually for me, what has been most empowering is to have gone public, to have helped raise awareness of both how ‘normal’ this is and how harmful it is.”

On reflection, Francesca’s original fear of attention-seeking has a certain irony: “I am certainly seeking attention now. That night, I was forced to share a level of intimacy which I usually reserve for the people I trust and care for. I was violated against my will, by a friend who unfortunately remains on the periphery of my life.

“Rape is incredibly complex and can have devastating consequences, whatever the situation. Right now, there is a critical and pressing need for us to broaden our understanding of the issues and educate future generations on the nature of consent.”