This bishop has a bone to pick with Disney
Rachel Treweek tells why she’s helping youngsters see the perils of prettiness
The Church of England’s first female diocesan bishop, the Right Reverend Rachel Treweek, is discussing the problem that she has with Queen Elsa and Princess Anna, the female leads from the animated Disney film.
“Everyone says [the film] is really great because the girls have courage, that they are not just typical princesses because they are brave and strong,” says the Bishop of Gloucester.
“But they are still beautiful, slim, petite, thin-waisted, big-eyed princesses. The film is still saying if you are going to be successful, you still have to look a certain way. We start with those messages from a young age. They are not good role models.”
Bishop Treweek is on a crusade. This week, she launches a social media campaign to redefine how young boys and girls view themselves and to challenge negative body image, which she fears is creating a new generation with low self-esteem that can lead to mental health problems.
The campaign, which features photos of schoolchildren with a specific part of their body that they don’t like airbrushed out, comes with its own hashtag, #liedentity – a wordplay to stress the fake and unrealistic representations of young people’s bodies and lives that are to be found online.
Her initiative follows a Children’s Society report earlier this year that found that a third of girls are unhappy with their appearance, a feeling that is attributed to the pressure to be perfect that is exerted by advertising and social media.
This month, the Girlguiding movement’s Girls’ Attitude Survey found that more than a third of girls aged seven to 10 believe they are rated more on looks than ability. It also found that, in the past five years, body confidence levels of those aged seven to 21 has plummeted.
And all this after last week’s news that Cardwell & Simons, a photography firm that works in 700 schools across the UK, has introduced a photoshopping service to airbrush away pupils’ imperfections.
Between now and Christmas, the bishop will visit secondary schools to hear for herself the impact that social media is wreaking on young minds. (She had a taste of what to expect during a visit to Eastwood Park women’s prison, where she was struck by the “poor self-worth” of inmates for “all sorts of reasons”, including their appearance.)
For the Church, this is uncharted territory, and spearheaded by Bishop Treweek, 53, who made history in July 2015 by becoming the most senior female bishop and the first to sit in the House of Lords.
We meet in an office overlooking Gloucester Cathedral as the bells peal to conclude a graduation service, and the students – young women in skyscraping heels – come flooding out.
“It really, really concerns me that young people’s perceived worth and value has got so caught up in visual appearance,” she says, shaking her head. “This is something that I haven’t yet seen the Church picking up on.”
She also has a personal reason for taking up the cause, as she remembers life as a 5ft 10in girl of 14 with “really bad acne” while growing up in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire.
“I was very aware of not reaching a standard of prettiness. For school photos, I was always sent to the back. At discos, I would look down on the boys I was dancing with. I had huge, size 8 feet – not particularly what a girl wants. Trying to find fashionable shoes for a 14-year-old with size 8 feet was a nightmare. Those kind of things made me feel really self-conscious.”
She struggled through, aided by the fact that her self-worth wasn’t caught up in her appearance – something she attributes to a strong Christian faith, a lack of social media in her formative years, and access to positive adult role models. She attended Brownies, church and dance groups, and describes her upbringing as “typically middle-class”.
She was the youngest of three children and her father worked in the City as a ship repair broker. Her mother stayed at home to bring up the family. Rachel studied linguistics at Reading University then began her career as a paediatric speech and language therapist in the NHS, a background that ensured she learnt the importance of children being able to communicate clearly.
A calling from God ensured that she retrained at an Anglican theological college in her early thirties, and she was ordained in 1994. In 2006, she married the Reverend Guy Treweek, then a priest-in-charge of two London parishes. He has since taken time out from his career to support her; they have no children.
Bishop Treweek has had to remain adept at deflecting superficial criticism and raises one particularly barbed comment, written about her below a critical article on her appointment in the summer of 2015.
“This bloke had written: ‘Oh, she looks really ugly anyway.’ It was interesting because I didn’t think that would have been his comment when dismissing a male bishop. For girls, it is all about what you look like.”
She is dressed in a purple crushed velvet jacket, purple clerical smock, gently mauve lipstick, silver rings and black knee-high boots. The bishop made headlines earlier this year after she had her purple bishop’s jacket nipped in by a tailor so that it had a more feminine line.
“What we wear and what we look like can be an expression of who we are – and that is great – but it is not who we are,” she says. To that end, she feels too much is made of the Prime Minister’s leopard-print heels.
“Why is it that people can comment on Theresa May and what she wears? If David Cameron had worn some bright pink tie with blue spots, I suppose [the media] might have made a comment on it, but it seems to be about her identity.”
A year into her role in one of the world’s oldest boys’ clubs, does she still feel the need to live up to different standards? She thinks not. Being the first female diocesan bishop meant she had no role models and the “freedom” to “bring into this who I am”. It’s a gentle sidestep.
Right now, her message is clear. She would like to see people dancing to their own tune, the true route to happiness, and not take social media as gospel.
And Disney, Barbie and all the rest need to sort out their imaging departments?
“They do!” she laughs. “But, actually, I’d still love Barbie because I’d love her for who she was.”