The Girls Are Not All Right
American teenage girls are reporting unprecedented levels of depression and suicidal thoughts. What the hell is going on?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that sexual attacks and other traumatic experiences have led to an unprecedented level of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among America's young women.
Results from the CDC's “Youth Risk Behavior Survey” find that nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt "persistently sad or hopeless,” the highest rate in a decade, while 30% said they have “seriously considered dying by suicide.” That figure increased by nearly 60% in the last 10 years.
The CDC survey also finds sexual violence has gone up among girls, with 1 in 5 saying they had experienced it within the last year. Fourteen percent said they had been forced into having sex, up from 11% of teen girls who said they'd been sexually assaulted in 2019.
Between post-pandemic trauma (something I think we all struggle with), living with mass shootings, rising sexual violence, and the loss of abortion rights, can we even pretend to be surprised that young women in America are struggling to survive?
As a mother of two young girls, these stats throb in my mind like a migraine waiting to implode behind my left eye. But what angers and frightens me most is that when researchers looked at gender differences, girls are more likely to report feelings of hopelessness than boys by a large margin.
“Our teenage girls are suffering through an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma, and it’s affecting their mental health," Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, said in an interview with NBC news. "For every 10 teenage girls you know, at least one of them, and probably more, has been raped.”
That statement is unacceptable to me but what is really daunting about these numbers is that they are from a survey done in 2021— before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. When we factor in forced birth, the only way these stats have to go is up.
Oh wait, that’s already happening.
Feminist author, Jessica Valenti, and my own personal feminist hero 🥰 , cites in her Substack to a study from the University of Pennsylvania, also done before Roe was overturned, that finds abortion restrictions cause a “significant increase” in the suicide rate among women of reproductive age. Valenti says that it’s not difficult to imagine how much worse these numbers will get in the post-Roe America we are living in.
It is unbelievable to me that that young women and girls are needlessly dying and suffering at this rate in the world’s richest democracy in 2023. Who would have ever thought? Not me.
Before I moved to America for college in the 1990’s from Bangladesh, I used to view the States as a “feminist utopia” where women’s equality was something that had already been achieved. If you had told me that two decades later I would be raising my daughters in a country where they would be up against this much violence and lack of reproductive autonomy, in addition to mental health challenges, I would not have believed it.
Yet, here we are.
Valenti points out that “there is no good reason that this country, with all of its knowledge and power, should continue to pretend that it’s impossible to change the way young women are treated.” But it does.
How much more anguish will we ask girls to endure? Apparently, a lot more.