International Law

Incitement to Anorexia

By Eoin

L’Assemblée nationale française (the lower house of the French parliment) yesterday passed a “Draft law aimed at fighting incitement to seek extreme thinness or anorexia” providing for fines of to ?30,000 and terms of imprisonment of up to two years for inciting to “excessive thinness” and more if the incitement results in death (see Associated Press | Daily Telegraph | Guardian | International Herald Tribune here and here | Irish Independent | Irish Times | Media Law Prof Blog | New York Times). The Bill will go before le Sénat (the upper house) next month. According to the Guardian, the Bill:

would bar any form of media, including websites, magazines and advertisers, from promoting extreme thinness, encouraging severe weight-loss or methods for self-starvation … [and] is specifically aimed at what French MPs called pro-anorexia “propaganda” websites … [which] support anorexia as a lifestyle choice rather than a medical disorder … The blogs and forums, which have developed in the US since 2000 and grown in France over the past two years, often include talk-boards frequented mainly by teenage girls and young women with advice on how to get through the pain of extreme hunger after eating a yoghurt a day, or how to hide extreme weight-loss from parents or doctors. Some use pictures of excessively thin models as “thinspiration” for self-starvation.

There is plainly an important social issue here, and much good work is done in Ireland by groups such as Bodywhys (the logo for their online support group is above). Indeed, more can be done to combat this problem without recourse to censorship. (more…)

Full post as published by Cearta on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).