Eating disorders now chief concern for children online

Eating disorders have overtaken cyberbullying as the leading source of online concern among children aged 10 to 16, a study has revealed.

Almost three in 10 (29 per cent) said they had viewed content encouraging anorexia, compared with 22 per cent who cited cyberbullying, according to the survey of almost 2,000 children.

While the figure for cyberbullying has changed little since 2014, the research recorded a rise of eight percentage points for eating disorders.

The study, from Youthworks Consulting, which collaborates with schools, shows the number of children viewing pro-anorexia sites soars during the teenage years, from 22 per cent at age 12 to 44 per cent at 15.

Experts said the rise of photo-based platforms, where users “compete” to be the thinnest, had led to children becoming more conscious about their bodies. A study by Syracuse University in the US found 3.4 million images and posts under the terms “anorexia” or “thinspiration” in the past year, including 13,700 on Facebook, 2.1m on Twitter and 560,000 on Instagram.

Dr Agnes Ayton, chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ faculty of eating disorders, said: “There is a strong competitive element to this … there is the technology now to share those images that would not have been available 10 or 15 years ago.”

As social media and internet usage has grown, so too has the number of hospital admissions for potentially life-threatening eating disorders, doubling from 7,260 in 2010/11 to 16,023 in the year to April 2018.

Facebook and Instagram have pledged to ban images of rib cages, concave stomachs and “thigh gaps”, but Jennifer Grygiel, a social media expert at Syracuse, warned that the algorithms used to weed out images were not strong enough, and more human moderators were needed.