It is intensely concerning, though unfortunately not surprising, that so many girls are self-harming (Report, 29 August). This adds to a flourishing physique of justification of a Mental Health predicament among immature women and girls, with basin as good as post-traumatic highlight commotion (PTSD) during shocking rates. Body image, pressures during propagandize and gender stereotypes are righteously cited as probable explanations, though they are not a full story.
The sexualisation of girls, a pressures they face around sex, and quite a shocking levels of passionate and other forms of assault they experience, contingency be a pivotal partial of a conversation. If we continue to bury a heads in a silt on this issue, self-harm total will continue to rise.
It is critical we see investment in Mental health support that takes into comment girls’ needs and practice in both schools and a village to safeguard they get a support they need. But we also need to see efforts to tackle a enlightenment that normalises assault and abuse opposite girls.
Jessica Southgate
Policy manager, Agenda, a fondness for women and girls during risk
• There is ascent justification of wretchedness among immature people, including neglected teenagers, a homeless, those in custody, those with mental health, drug and ethanol problems who can't entrance services, and those vital in bad families. And there are those immature people denied entrance to internal residential mental health units and those who self-harm. As your editorial (30 August) suggests, this has something to do with a inlet of adolescence, a pressures of exams, a impact of amicable media, generally on girls, capricious futures and a miss of services due to draconian cuts. But a predicament of these groups of exposed teenagers raises wider questions about a emotional, element and domestic standing of all immature people in families, schools, communities and society.
It seems their voices are usually listened during predicament point, rather than being included, as a matter of course, in those governmental institutions that figure their bland lives – something sadly lacking in stream domestic discourse.
Prof Mike Stein
University of York
• You tell an essay about a problems of impractical self-image for immature girls; and on a same day – in G2 – photographs of unusually slim and flattering girls modelling clothes. The Guardian and all other newspapers that effect to be endangered about this could simply protest such images and use, instead, photographs of normal young women.
Michael Heaton
Warminster, Wiltshire
