The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) is respected widely around the world, though among right-wing science-denying Americans not so much. Perhaps they don’t like their reports for ideological reasons rather than scientific reasons.
The CDC has issued a vitally important report that these same right-wing opponents will also want to reject. The report was called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (‘CDC Youth Risk Report). According to this report, teen girls in the US have experienced record levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk in recent years.
The CDC Youth Risk Report also shone a spotlight on alarming statistics about young girls being forced into sex and harbouring serious thoughts of suicide. How is this possible in the greatest country in the world?
If the report is true, and I have heard no evidence-based critique of it, it is extremely important that American political leaders of all stripes not ignore it. Although more than 17,000 students participated in the report it was conducted in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally many children, no doubt more than normally the case, were anxious and feeling isolated.
Jonathan Haidt a social psychologist at New York University and a leader at a laboratory on social psychology has shown the scientific data does not support the idea that the cause of this problem is the pandemic. The evidence clearly showed that this trend predated the pandemic and there was only a surprisingly minor blip during the pandemic.
I want to also say that this is not an American problem. Haidt confirmed that the science is very similar for Canada and the UK.
Nonetheless, according to Debra Houry, the Chief Medical Officer for the CDC “the results are alarming.”
The CDC Youth Risk Report said that more than 40% of high school students had feelings of sadness or hopelessness “that prevented them from engaging in their regular activities for a least two weeks of the year.” That is nearly half! Do we think nearly half were just trying to get an extended vacation?
I know some students in Canada who had such feelings and they were real. Interestingly, girls suffered more than boys with rates nearly double that of boys. 57% of girls and 29% of boys felt persistently sad or hopeless. Added to that, nearly 1 in 3 teenage girls considered attempting suicide! That was 60 percent higher than 10 years earlier!
Finally, 1 in 7 teen girls said they had at some point been forced to have sex and nearly 1 in 5 had experienced violence within the past year.
Some parents on hearing about this report said they were filled with “prayerful hope” that this was a mere “reflection of this pandemic uncertainty.”
Personally, I hope that Evangelical supporters of right-wing regimes across the US consider more than just prayerful hopes and pay some attention to the scientific data, even if it’s not perfect. Relying solely on such hopes could be dangerous for young people.
They really need more than prayerful hope!