Online Exposure to Eating Disorders

Today, children can find very easy access to information on eating disorders, thanks mainly to pro-ana websites. The Internet is one place where children are provided ample opportunity to learn about eating disorders. It is very easily accessible and huge, two critical parameters that have always shown up the darker side of the Internet.

While the Internet has revolutionized our lives for the better, it brings along with it a very dark side. Anyone – children or adults – can access it. Anyone can post any stuff on the Internet, for anyone to view. It is this kind of free and easy access that is proving slowly to be one of the biggest causes of children being exposed to information on eating disorders, especially anorexia today.

The Internet has literally transformed the leisure activities of children. Where earlier children would go out and play, or hang out with friends, today they prefer sitting in front of the computer and accessing the Internet. Many of the sites on the Internet do not have enough levels of security layering to be able to prevent children from accessing harmful or irrelevant data.

Pro-Ana Sites and the Internet

While the Internet allowed professionals from the medical field to put out much needed information about eating disorders, it simultaneously allowed people that were into anorexia, bulimia, and other forms of eating disorders, people who refused to recognize that they had a problem, to put up ‘their version of the story’.

In this article, I will discuss specifically the pro-Anorexia sites that reared their heads on the Internet between 2001 and 2003. While these sites have gone out of circulation now, the fact they were floating around and were accessible to the general Internet surfer, seemed to countermand all the hard work that the professionals from the medical field were putting in to fight eating disorders.

The Pro-Ana Movement

Before getting into the business of discussing the pro-anorexia sites, we need to be clear about who actually were putting up these sites. The last part of the 20th century saw a movement called pro-ana, which projected itself as a social movement that talked of anorexia not as an illness or a disorder, but rather as a lifestyle choice.

As mentioned earlier, the pro-ana movement gained momentum during the years 2001 through 2003, when they put up a number of pro-ana discussion forums as well as websites. These sites and forums, however, did not encourage people to turn anorexic. They acted as meeting points, for people who realized that they were anorexic, to come together on a common shared platform and talk about their situation.

Pro Ana Sites >>