ABSTRACT
Self-harm might seem like an odd thing to include in a book concerning children, but we do know that although self-harm is more likely to occur in adolescents, it does occur in younger children. Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is a term to describe a “deliberate act which people engage in with the intention of causing harm to themselves” (Fitzpatrick, 2012, p. 12). Our knowledge of how many children self-harm is limited to presentations to accident and emergency departments and self-reporting within the community (Fitzpatrick, 2012, p. 14). The likelihood is that those children that attend hospital settings are most likely to be self-harming in a way that is most physically serious (i.e., may require medical intervention) or most obvious to a caregiver. It would suggest that there are children who self-harm that do not present within community or hospital settings, and either they hide it from their caregivers so that it isn’t known by adults in their lives, or for other reasons it is not recorded.
