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Websites and designers face prosecution in new French anorexia law

Promoting extreme thinness will become a criminal offence punishable by a jail sentence under a government-backed law that was tabled yesterday in France to combat anorexia nervosa.

The world’s first use of the law to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement. While many are support groups, others promote starvation as a “life-style choice”, with girls and young women posting their wasting images as “thinspiration” for others.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have come under pressure in Britain and other countries recently to ban their pro-ana entries.

Last month a website that originated in France caused an outcry for encouraging children as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure. The Miss Bimbo site invites users to create a virtual doll, keep it “waif thin” with diet pills and buy it breast implants and facelifts. The website attracted 1.2 million players in France.



Fines of up to £24,000 and a two-year prison sentence will be imposed on offenders who “provoke a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment” to the point of risking death or damage to health. The prison term is raised to three years with a Euro 45,000 fine if the person dies.

Some experts and fashion leaders oppose the Bill, which is expected to be passed by Parliament within months. “You do not solve this kind of problem with the law but with understanding,” Jean-Paul Gaultier, the designer, said. Didier Grumbach, head of the French Couture Federation, said it was not up to the state to legislate on beauty and aesthetic criteria.

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