Denying childhood: Exploitation and the body image of six-year olds

• Funding of The Butterfly Foundation to expand body image education services to more than 2500 educators and over 100,000 young people in its work on eating disorders and negative body image;

• Commissioning the development of body image posters and supporting materials for school communities through Education Services Australia;

• Endorsing and releasing a Voluntary Industry Code of Conduct on Body Image, outlining principles to guide the media, advertising and fashion industries to ‘adopt more body image friendly practices’, to promote cultural change in those industries;

• Investing $3.5m through the Department of Health and Ageing to ‘tackle eating disorders’.

In part, this was a response to recommendations made by the former National Advisory Group on Body Image (NAGBI), set up in March 2009 to ‘provide advice on the challenging issue of body image’.

Principle 6 of the Code states that working or modelling in fashion shows targeting adult audiences and modelling adult clothes should be restricted to models of 16 and over. The rationale is that such shows, particularly backstage, ‘are often an adult environment’ making it possible that children ‘will be exposed to inappropriate situations for which they are ill-equipped’.

That employing under-sixteens has a detriment effect on them is not the only issue. As the Code says, the impact goes beyond them:

The growing tendency to use young models whose bodies conform to thin ideals that are often impossible for adult models to attain through healthy behaviours is of concern. This practice is seen as contributing to unhealthy ideals and can encourage unhealthy weight management practices, including by other models.

When the NAGBI was established, little was it thought that two years on, children would be at the forefront of the push to have human beings who happen to be female defined solely by reference to body size, shape and seductive capacity.

And surely this is what beauty pageants are all about?

As the Code acknowledges, ‘a significant role’, in shaping society’s cultural ideals is played by the fashion, media and advertising industries. Furthermore, ‘messages about beauty portrayed in popular media can contribute to body image pressures on young people’.

Is it enough to say that child beauty pageants ‘bond’ mothers and their daughters, that mothers and daughters ‘enjoy’ themselves or ‘have a good time’ participating in them? Are we to similarly to applaud mothers and daughters ‘bonding’ over dietary regimes that lead to anorexia, or slimming efforts that are precursors to bulimia?