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The Anar Foundation confirms the alert of pediatricians: eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideations and anxiety through the roof, while physical abuse increases.
Less than a month ago, it was Spanish pediatricians who launched an SOS to the health authorities. Today it is the Anar Foundation. The organization that manages the main help lines and first intervention for any type of problem or violence against children has activated the same alert signal. The diagnoses, both based on data and first-hand knowledge, are practically coincident: the effects of the pandemic have crushed children and adolescents and have triggered all kinds of mental health disorders. Benjamín Ballesteros' warning to health officials is clear. "We must act now due to the severity of the trends," says the director of Anar Programs.
The x-ray composed of the report prepared with the requests for help from minors to Anar's phones and chat, both during confinement and in the different stages of alarm status, it is black as coal. As a summary it can be said that they received 166.433 communications in 2020, of which 11.761 are serious cases and up to 2.277 (about six a day) required emergency interventions of health, social, psychologist, police or fiscal services. Serious cases were 39% more than in 2019 and emergency actions were 55% more.
The balance speaks for itself. Eating disorders, episodes of self-harm, suicidal ideations, anxiety and depression through the roof and huge increases in physical abuse and attacks through technology, such as sexual extortion or child pornography.
The three months of confinement were, according to Ballesteros' description, "a 'Molotov cocktail' in homes" that had a full impact on the youngest people. A situation of minimal space, aggravated by the work problems of adults -telecommuting, ERTE, layoffs-, fear of the virus and mourning for loved ones, the absence of social relationships and the lack of protective places such as school or the doctor, was a source of enormous frustration, helplessness and despair.
The first consequences were that adolescents with suicidal ideations multiplied by three, anxiety symptoms increased by four, and depression almost doubled. Physical abuse increased by 21% -up to almost 16% of calls- and the problems of technological violence grew by almost 30%, with cases of 'grooming' -adults posing as young people to obtain images, sexual videos or meetings through of blackmail or deception - rising by 60%, episodes of child pornography by 42%, and with much more 'cyberbullying' and gender violence through mobile phones.
With the first departures of the summer, emergencies for eating disorders skyrocketed - which motivated almost nine times more requests for help than in 2019 - amid a degradation of family environments, with very strong increases in problems due to separations and custody or child visitation regimes, and with a growth in queries about aid due to poverty, which multiplied by four those of twelve months before.
Strengthen Mental Health
The worrying trends, however, did not stop exacerbating as the months passed and the complex return to the classrooms. It was at that moment that another of the exercise's alarms was detected to a greater extent: the great increase in cases of self-harm (scratches, cuts, burns, etc.) in young people. Requests for help were three times more numerous than in 2019. An extremely contagious behavior among physical or virtual acquaintances that seeks to combat states of anxiety and stress and draw attention to their problems.
The Anar Foundation, as pediatricians already did, asks administrations for urgent action so that the enormous damage caused to children and young people by the pandemic does not become chronic. They demand a strategy to eradicate violence against children, the assignment of a greater number of professionals to the area of juvenile Mental Health, the activation of all protocols to detect serious cases, and the expediting of the creation of specialized childhood and family courts provided for in the law for the comprehensive protection of minors who It came into force on June 25.
