Malik Shakur
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Australian Politics
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Auckland, New Zealand
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Now let's look at the result of the sexualisation and objectification of women in the West.
Miranda almost died from anorexia. She is eight years old Rhodes Farm is Britain's largest residential clinic for children with eating disorders. In this moving report, Amelia Hill spends a week with patients and staff to learn how this debilitating and terrifying disease can be treated Amelia Hill The Observer, Sunday November 18, 2007 Article historyMiranda turned eight years old last week. For her birthday, her parents took her to a pizza parlour, where she ate pasta and ice-cream. For any other child, it would have been a common enough treat. But for Miranda, the trip was nothing short of momentous.
Three-and-a-half months ago, seven-year-old Miranda was almost 23 pounds lighter than she should have been, with a body mass index (BMI) of just 12.5. A BMI of under 18.5 is officially considered to be underweight but, despite being considerably below that, Miranda continued not only to refuse to eat but also to drink.
Distraught and desperate, Miranda's parents, Simon and Joanna, sent her to Rhodes Farm in north London, Britain's first and largest residential clinic for child anorexics. They were told she was suffering from food avoidance emotional disorder and would have to stay in the clinic for five months. They were warned, however, that restoring her body to health was only the beginning of a much longer battle to heal her mind.
Last week, during an extraordinary visit to the clinic by The Observer, Miranda tried to explain what it is like to suffer an eating disorder at such a young age. 'It's like a pixie in my tummy who is like the devil and is always fighting me when I want to eat,' she said, sitting curled on the sofa with her stuffed dog, Bonny, clutched to her cheek. 'The pixie was stronger than me but now I'm a little bit stronger than him. He's getting smaller, and I'm getting bigger and soon he will have disappeared.'
To many, Miranda is shockingly young to suffer an eating disorder. She is, however, far from the youngest child whose life the doctors at Rhodes Farm have been asked to save. A few years ago, Dr Dee Dawson, founder and medical director of the clinic, treated a six-year-old with all the classic signs of anorexia nervosa. Great Ormond Street sees even younger children with other types of eating disorder.
'The age of children suffering eating disorders is definitely getting younger and younger; there is no doubt about that at all,' said Dawson. 'It used to be rare to see girls here before they hit puberty but now they make up at least one third of the children treated here at any one time. The average age of onset used to be 16 but that age is steadily dropping.'
Anorexia nervosa is a life-threatening condition, thought to affect around one in 100 schoolchildren, 10 per cent of whom are boys. Government research suggests new cases have increased by 40 per cent since 1990 but the cause of the disease remains a mystery and the best way of treating it is an inexact science. The disease continues to kill between 6 to 10 per cent of those it affects, either through starvation or suicide. A third of those who survive require ongoing treatment for their frequent relapses.
Since Dawson introduced the concept of residential homes for children with eating disorders into Britain 18 years ago, Rhodes Farm has treated 2,000 children. Those referred to the clinic, normally by the NHS, weigh on average just 67.75 per cent of their healthy minimum body weight. They are often within days, and sometimes hours, of death. Yet, in around 16 weeks, most of these children are physically well enough to return home. Just 16 per cent of children treated at Rhodes Farm continue to live lives dominated by their illness.
The Observer was granted unprecedented and unrestricted access to Rhodes Farm, from 6am for the morning weigh-in, which ensures the girls are gaining the required one kilogram a week in weight, until after the older girls went to bed at 10pm. They were supervised continuously throughout the night to ensure they didn't secretly exercise off the calories they had eaten during the day.
In what was a revealing insight into a disease that kills more of its sufferers than any other psychiatric illness - while remaining one of the least understood of all mental diseases - The Observer spoke to the girls and their parents, and attended group therapy sessions. We also sat in on training courses where doctors, nurses and carers openly discussed their uncertainties and fears concerning the girls whose lives they were struggling to save.
A day at the 32-bed Rhodes Farm begins, twice a week, with the early morning weigh-in. To prevent the children 'tanking' - drinking litres of water to conceal their continued weight loss - the girls are also randomly weighed throughout the week and carefully monitored, a measure introduced after a girl went permanently blind in one eye after drinking five litres of water, damaging her brain through water intoxication.
The weigh-in is an anxious time for the children. Unless they gain a kilogram each week, the clinic forbids them from taking part in activities such as dancing and aerobics that use up calories their body can't spare. Home visits are also subject to this rule, as children will inevitably expend more calories outside the clinic than inside it. If they still fail to maintain their weight, their release date will be
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