![]() Teenage fiction deals with issues around cutting. A full-page picture shows a pretty girl cradling her injured arm as if it were a baby. In a recent issue of the teen-magazine Mizz, there is a feature about a teenage girl who is cutting herself. Her father is seriously worried and her friends are concerned. In the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks, one of the characters, Lisa, is cutting herself. Their sense that cutting is not extraordinary is echoed in the culture that surrounds them. Their peers do not seem to see the self-abuse as profoundly disturbing, more as something that is 'stupid', 'ignorant' and 'sad' in the sense of pathetic. Very often their parents have no idea what they are doing, nor do their teachers. They are usually but not always girls, and aged between 13 and 15. And it is simultaneously very serious and weirdly casual - a cross between Sylvia Plath and wearing your baseball cap backwards.Īll over the country, teenagers are cutting themselves, and in some schools it has almost become a group-led gothic kind of fashion-statement: a grungy display of hardness (look at the pain I can bear) and softness (look at the pain I am feeling inside). ![]() This is both public display and private self-abuse, a morbid secret and a public confession. ![]() Anyway, she wears trousers and has long sleeves, and is careful not to let her cuts show. When healed, the marks up her arm or on her inner thighs may resemble the scratches made by a cat, or brambles, and perhaps you would think nothing of them. ![]()
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