Self-injurious behaviour and body site preference.
Kids with ID who self-injure hit the front of their head and backs of hands most—protect these spots first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched the kids with intellectual disability who hit themselves every day.
They wrote down where each blow landed for two weeks.
All kids lived in a special school and had mild to moderate delays.
What they found
Eight out of ten hits went to the head or hands.
Kids mostly struck the front of their head and the backs of their hands.
One-third of the hurt spots matched places that block pain signals in animal studies.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (2012) also mapped behavior in ID youth, but looked at crime types instead of body targets.
Both studies show that kids with ID have clear patterns you can predict.
Kaufman et al. (2010) found these same kids misread social cues, which may link to why they hit themselves when upset.
Peters et al. (2013) later showed adults with profound ID lose daily skills over time, reminding us that self-injury risks may shift as clients age.
Why it matters
You can now place soft helmets and padded gloves on the exact spots most at risk.
Use this map during your functional analysis to see if hits line up with pain-blocking areas.
Share the picture with parents so they know what to watch for at home.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Self-injury by people with intellectual disabilities is a highly problematic and damaging behaviour with profound implications for quality of life. To date, very little detailed descriptive information has been available on the distribution and location of body sites that are injured. This study presents preliminary information on the locations of the self-injury body sites of 29 school-age individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities who self-injured daily. Teaching staff in school-based special education programmes independently recorded the body locations of where their student's self-injured. Approximately 80% of the reported self-injury was directed disproportionately toward the head and hands. Three-quarters of head-directed self-injury was located on the front of the head, and 83% of hand-directed self-injury was located on the back of the hands. Furthermore, 32% of the body sites toward which self-injury was directed were located on stimulation-produced analgesia body sites. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the opioid hypothesis of self-injurious behaviour, and with regard to future research investigating functional diagnostic strategies considering both social and biological variables.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1997 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1997.tb00737.x