Dear Department of Education, and NSPCC,

I am petitioning for an increase in the protection of young people from 'thinspiration' sites and blogs online. This includes raising awareness through teaching in schools, more resources to support people running or using thinspiration, and steps taken towards the outright banning of these sites.

Thinspiration (or 'Thinspo') sites are created as a means of promoting and maintaining eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa. Rather than offering support for recovery, in the way that organisations such as 'beat' do, these sites encourage people to restrict their diet to a dangerous extent.

Thinspiration can include pictures of size zero (or smaller) models, anorexia suffers, and 'before and after' scenarios. Thinspo diets reccomend a few hundred calories per day, plus fasting entirely on certain days of the week. Mantras that encourage unhealthy thinking habits include "It is not a disease, it's a lifestyle", and "I  believe that I am the most vile, worthless and useless person ever to have existed on this planet, and I am totally unworthy of anyone's time and attention".

Thinspiration is used by many people, including those wishing to dodge their eating disorder treatment. However, it is possible for anyone to find a blog posting pictures of 'beautiful' anorexic women, and become sucked into the competative and dangerous world of diet restriction.

The potential for a young person to come across one of these 'pro-ana' or 'pro-mia' sites is shockingly easy. I was never warned about thinspiration, and I believe that this could become an important element of online safety education. As an anorexia sufferer, I found that exposure to thinspo sites made me feel a crushing sense of guilt for attempting to gain weight, and gave me a desire to 'cheat on' my treatment. Before even being diagnosed, it was cultures like these that gave me damaging thought patterns.

Of the 1.6 million people in the UK suffering from eating disorders, it is estimated that around 20% of those people will die from anorexia nervosa. The most suceptible age group seems to be teenage girls, and I think it is no coincidence that these are the people who most often create and partake in thinpiration.

The current state of our culture expects young people to idolise thin models and celebrities, and to expect criticism and humiliation of anyone who does not conform. Whilst it is a somewhat arduous task to dismantle the celebrity culture, I believe a positive option is to target children before they become influcened by the media and peer pressure to become thin.

If children were encouraged to steer clear of blogs that normalise what is a very serious and damaging mental illness, I would hope that the number of cases per year of anorexia would decrease. Just as children are encouraged to avoid anyone who might be wanting to harm them online, we should be encouraging them to avoid groups that could lead to extreme health complications, and potentially death.

I hope you take this petition into consideration, and introduce appropriate measures to protect young people from a growing culture of glorifying dangerous weight loss.

Thank you.