Patricia A. and Peter Adler

THOUSAND OAKS, CA - Noted sociologists Patricia A. and Peter Adler will present “Self-Injury: The Silent Epidemic” on Thursday, March 1, at California Lutheran University.

The talk at 7 p.m. in Lundring Events Center will draw on a 10-year longitudinal study that included 150 interviews with self-injurers from all over the world and analysis of more than 30,000 Internet posts in chat rooms and other communiqués. Self-injury, or the deliberate destruction of one’s own body tissue, includes cutting, burning, branding and bone-breaking.

Patricia Adler, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Peter Adler, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver, published their findings in August in “The Tender Cut: Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury.” Their research follows self-injury from its early days, when people engaged in it alone, to the present, where a subculture has formed via cyberspace. The practice emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. The Adlers argue that self-injury is not a suicidal gesture, as long considered, but instead a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion. It’s a way of converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain.

The husband-and-wife team has written and taught aboutdeviance, drugs and society, and the sociology of gender, children, work, sport and leisure. They are the co-authors and co-editors of many books including “Peer Power,” “Paradise Laborers” and “Constructions of Deviance.” They also have edited the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Together, they served as co-presidents of the Midwest Sociological Society and received the 2010 George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

The free lecture is the second in an annual series established by the estate of Paul and Eleanora Culver of Lake Sherwood. CLU’s Center for Equality and Justice, Pearson Library and departments of communication, criminal justice, political science, psychology and sociology are sponsoring the event.

Lundring Events Center is located in the Gilbert Sports and Fitness Center on the north side of Olsen Road near Mountclef Boulevard. For more information, contact Adina Nack at nack@callutheran.edu or 805-493-3438.