Automutilation in childhood

This thesis deals with the topic of self-injury of adolescents. Its goal is to analyze the adolescents' view of self-injury, how the youth themselves define self-injury and what they perceive to be self-injurious behavior. The work is divided into two core parts. The first section focuses on the definition of the self-injury and reviews both current Czech and international literature. Particular attention is devoted to the inconsistent terminology, definitions and presentation of the recent classification system of selfinjury. The second part is devoted to the research of explorative character. The data have been collected through a survey using anonymous self report questionnaire from 73 pupils between the ages of 13-15 and they were analysed using categorization and the method of factor and cluster analysis. Factor analysis extracted ten factors which served as the meaningful units and can be interpreted as adolescents' viewpoints of self-injury. Findings suggest the adolescents consider not only direct destruction of one's own body as example self-injury but also behavior that indirectly leads to negative health outcomes (eating disorders, smoking, abuse of alcohol). Interestingly, the youth reported ambivalent viewpoint of self-injury. They reported not only the losses and the possible risks of such..