Towards the end of last year, a shocking statistic appeared deep in the pages of a World Health Organisation report. It was this: suicide has become the leading killer of teenage girls, worldwide.
More girls aged between 15 and 19 die from self-harm than from road accidents, diseases or complications of pregnancy.
For years, child-bearing was thought to cause the most deaths in this age group. But at some point in the last decade or so – statistics were last collected on this scale in 2000 - suicide took over. And, according to the WHO’s revised data for 2000, it had already just inched its way ahead of maternal mortality at the turn of the millennium.
Yet, somehow, we didn’t notice.
I heard the statistic from Sarah Degnan Kambou, President of theInternational Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), at a Gates Foundation breakfast last month.
Most of my fellow guests worked in the fields of global women’s rights or female health. Yet they were as stunned as I was to hear it.
[For more of this story, written by Nisha Lilia Diu, go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wom...hing.-Heres-why.html]
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