Girlguiding UK launched its first ‘body confidence badge’ today in an effort to boost low self-esteem among young girls.
The charity believes girls are under pressure to look a certain way, and so it has developed courses designed to expose airbrushing in magazines and challenge unhealthy looks in the media.
This comes off the back of its survey, which revealed the depressing stats that one in five primary-school-aged children have been on a diet, and that 38% of girls aged between 11 and 21 admitted to skipping meals to lose weight. The Girlguiding UK programme will be delivered by specially-trained peer educators aged between 14 and 25, and girls who complete the training will be awarded a Free Being Me badge if they can show that they have understood the underlying ethos of the programme and worked on spreading the message in their schools and communities.
Anything that makes an attempt to tackle those grim stats is all very laudable, of course, but by giving girls a body confidence ‘test’, aren’t you running the risk that some will essentially feel like they’ve failed? And while a course with a badge might be a starting point to resolving young women’s body issues, they certainly won’t fix them overnight. By telling someone they've ticked the right boxes, and so are essentially ‘cured’ of body issues forever, you're taking an incredibly complicated issue and trying to turn it into something finite and black and white. If a girl does fail the course, how is that helping her relationship with her body?
Tackling body image in young women is so important, but by turning it into a competition, or something girls can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at is diluting the message and, at worse, distorting it completely. Discovering that you were a bit shitter than everyone else in your patrol at putting up a tent was bad enough.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.