Before I went any further in my journey to start finding people to speak to, I needed to learn more, discover more and read much more about self-injury and the support that’s out there.
What I didn’t expect to find was that 1 in 5 girls and young women in England between the ages of 16-24 self-harm, according to the a study published in the Lancet Psychiatry. That’s 20%. As shocked and upset that figure made me feel, I could only help but think about how even more relevant my upcoming documentary is.
Identifying my target audience
Despite already having an idea in my mind of who was going to be my target audience, that statistic helped me to confirm that I’d selected the right target market: BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra Stories. With a target audience of 15-24 year olds, this almost exactly matched the age range in my shocking statistic, and I knew immediately there’s going to be a lot of friends out there that could benefit from listening to my documentary.
I am only at the very start of my research and yet it has already helped me to understand so much more about self-harm and its complexity- how it’s often done as a coping mechanism for underlying emotional distress, or as a self punishment for one thing or another. It made me realise that self-harm is a much more complex and diverse issue than I first thought. I’m now prepared to learn.
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