The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) most recent report on the health and well-being of U.S. high school students was sharply contextualized by chief medical officer Dr. Deborah Houry’s headline-grabbing remark at the report’s release: “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma.” She confessed to being heartbroken as a parent and driven as a public health leader to take action to address the dramatic increases in violence, poor mental health and suicide risk reported among the findings of the Youth Risk Behavioral Survey (YRBS). Recalling her experience as an emergency room doctor treating a college student who had been raped, Houry acknowledged the need to do more than treat the physical injuries associated with the sexual violence that figured so prominently in the survey results.
While the CDC’s survey findings overall are daunting, they are particularly dire for girls.
- The percentage of female high school students who reported experiencing sexual violence by anyone during the past year was nearly four times as high as for male students—at 18 and 5 percent, respectively.
- The rate for female students rose 3 percentage points between 2017 and 2021, compared with a 1 percent increase for males.
- The percentage of girls reporting that they had ever been forced to have sex increased from 12 percent to 14 percent between 2011 to 2021—a figure at least three times higher than for boys during that period, whose rate remained at 4 percent.
Rape culture is defined in part by its tolerance of some degree of subjection of women to a continuum of threats, ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault, and the related physical and emotional toll they exact. Failure to enact, sustain or implement policy or other measures to address sexual violence in its many forms is tantamount to explicitly condoning it. This results not only in individual harms, but also constitutes a structural impediment to women’s advancement to positions of power in the public sphere.
Bullying, including sexual harassment as well as all forms of sexual and interpersonal violence, is associated with higher incidence of mental health issues. The CDC reported that, of the 29 percent of students who reported experiencing poor mental health in the last 30 days, females were more than twice as likely to report this. “Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased between 2011 and 2021, more steeply among female students—57 percent of whom reported such feelings in 2021 compared with 29 percent of male students.
A devastating 30 percent of female students reported having seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021, making them more than twice as likely as male students to entertain such ideation, and showing a more than 10 percent increase from a decade earlier. And, almost twice as many female students—13 percent—actually attempted suicide or were injured in a suicide attempt compared to male students.