Body Image Youth Forum

Mrs VLAHOS (Taylor) (16:12): I would like to speak today about an event I recently attended in September, which was a Body Image Youth Forum at the West Lakes convention centre, undertaken by the Eating Disorders Association of South Australia (EDASA), which is a wonderful community group that has been set up over the last couple of years and is run by volunteers. Its aim is to provide hope, recovery, support and guidance for people who are suffering from eating disorders and negative body image problems in South Australia.

The youth forum was a particularly great day. There were a number of interesting speakers there and a huge amount of active and very enthusiastic university volunteers who were helping to run a number of student workshops and in leading the kids through the process of the half day that we were down at West Lakes. The idea was to get middle senior school students at high school level to participate in looking at the way they consider body image.

The group was pretty much broken up into girls and boys from a variety of public and private schools from the central and inner northern areas of Adelaide and they had voluntarily come along to participate. It was fantastic to hear some of the speakers, including a Crows team person, talking about: what is fitness? What is good health? What is good body image? What is realistic body image? One of the things that I found most remarkable was the gentleman from Flinders University and the SHAPE Institute who talked about male dysmorphic body imagery and how increasingly prevalent that is amongst young men in our society.

As the mother of an eight-year-old boy, I increasingly see and hear on TV programs that a lot of young men are participating in excessive exercise and body nutrition, with protein supplements, sports drinks and things of that nature, in an attempt to make sure that they have a perfect physique, just as young women have been doing for a number of years because of the modifications we see in magazines with digital technology.

We unpacked some of those things during the workshop and it was a fantastic morning. I recently visited the ladies who run this association in their Sturt Street office and they said they had fantastic feedback from the day. For their first inaugural youth forum, I can only place on the record my praise for them and I look forward to working with them again next year and supporting the organisation.

I think it is fair to say, in the remaining time I have, that EDASA is a new organisation and for many people this is a very challenging issue. As a parent, even if you do not have a child with an eating disorder, knowing the symptoms to looking in the surrounding areas where you might help friends and family with what they encounter is really important. EDASA provides membership and confidential counselling, but with the support of volunteering and with the university relationships they have they are training a new generation of social workers, healthcare workers and a variety of other people to go out into the community and be more knowledgeable about eating disorders and negative food and health imagery in our society. I think that is only a very positive thing.

They also undertake fundraising activities. Recently, they participated in the City to Bay Fun Run and they are also in an exclusive contracted relationship with the Butterfly Foundation to deliver a range of health promotion and early intervention service programs because, really, prevention is the way forward with this issue. We need to be pitching that at primary school-aged students as much as we need to be teaching our secondary students media literacy skills to be able to prevent them falling prey to the negative and perfected image that the media sometimes portray.

The Butterfly Foundation has provided a unique range of workshops and presentations to help all members of the community understand the factors influencing negative body image and the rise of eating disorders amongst young people. It is the largest not-for-profit charitable foundation supporting sufferers of eating disorders and negative body image in Australia. Their partnership is creative and is flourishing, and I would like to place on the record my respect for the board of the EDASA committee and particularly the two ladies who are working so hard to transform this area and to prevent another generation in our society falling victim to this terrible disease, which has such a high suicide rate as a consequence of the illness.