It is the third week since the Foreign Correspondents‘ Program began. Time flies. I never thought that we would go through all the subjects so quickly. We were just getting to know each other and in few more days it would be time to say goodbye.
Today we were divided into small groups to see how big Finnish medias tell their news or stories. I was assigned to a group which will go to Yle, the Finnish national broad casting company, founded in 1926. They have four TV channels and 13 radio channels and 25 regional radio channels. They also have TV channel and radio channel for the Swedish speaking society, which are about 5% of the Finnish population.
The person in charge of me from Yle introduced me to a woman whose name is Michaela Rosenback. She is going to start a new project called, “Sjukt perfekt”, which means “sickly perfect” in Swedish. She is targeting young women who are suffering from low self-esteem. They tend to have panic attack, eating disorder, depression and so on. The statistics says that every tenth girl in Finland suffer from some kind of eating disorder during their teens.
We Japanese also have the same problem. The report from Unilever about self-esteem of young girls showed that Japanese had the least amount which was only 7% who were satisfied with their body type. I thought that this was a matter of gender because women tend to have these kind of problems more than men.
However, in a country where gender gap is comparatively low, the problem of lacking in confidence is also a problem which society has to face. And Ms Rosenback wanted to cover the story for people to realize how important this topic is. She asked girls to write their stories first and then told them to send a vlog about their thoughts. Almost everyone sent their vlogs to her.
It was also shocking in a positive way, how much the girls wanted to participate in this project because I know that it is not an easy thing to do.
However, the movement of body positivity is rising all over the world and demand for diversity in body types is higher. More curvy models are on the runway, there was a new law that prohibited the use of too slim models, and more people started to take pictures of their reality.
I am looking forward to the project and also the reactions of the audience. I already asked her to be my friend on Facebook so that we can exchange ideas for our projects.
Overall it was very exciting and interesting to know that in the other side of the world, there is a similar movement and journalists are doing their best to spread the message for a better world.