Objective: Immigrant adolescents are at risk of harming themselves. Interpersonal or acculturative stressors, including ethnic harassment, may contribute to adolescents’ engagement in self-harm. Despite a growing interest in the link between ethnic harassment and self-harm among immigrant youth, we have limited knowledge on the conditions that make ethnically harassed adolescents likely to self-harm. Thus, we aimed (a) to examine reasons why ethnically harassed youth self-harm and (b) to identify the conditions that elevate ethnically harassed youth’s engagement in self-harm.
Method: A total of 536 first- and second-generation immigrant adolescents living in Sweden (261 girls; Mage = 14.42; SD = 1.01) participated in the study and were followed over 1 year. Adolescents who reported more depressive symptoms and who harmed themselves were more likely to drop out. Results: The cross-sectional results showed that when adolescents were exposed to ethnic harassment, they felt more depressed, and they engaged in self-harm. This pattern was especially true for adolescents who had a strong desire to be perceived as part of the majority (βindirect = .07, z = 2.81, p = .01, 95% confidence interval [.03, .13]). These results were not confirmed longitudinally.
Conclusion: The cross-sectional findings suggest that immigrant adolescents wanting to be part of Swedish society may experience a clash between that desire and the responses they get from the society and may use self-harm as a viable way of overcoming ethnic-devaluation experiences. Future studies are needed to replicate our lack of longitudinal results and to provide explanations for this pattern of association.