Safety by Design: What Body Image Can Teach Us About Safeguarding in Dance

Earlier this week I attended Body Perspectives: Re-evaluating the Ideal, a conference organised by the National Institute of Dance Medicine and Science (NIDMS) at Elmhurst Ballet School. Bringing together researchers, healthcare professionals, educators, artistic leaders and dancers, the conference explored how body image affects health, wellbeing, participation and performance across the dance sector.

What struck me throughout the day was that many discussions about body image were also discussions about safeguarding. Not safeguarding in the traditional sense of responding to incidents after harm has occurred, but safeguarding as the proactive creation of environments that support health, wellbeing and participation. This aligns closely with a recent policy brief article that Dr Mary Quinton and I published, which argues that safeguarding in dance should be understood as a public health issue requiring prevention-focused, systems-level approaches rather than relying solely on responding to individual concerns.

Read our blog on safeguarding in dance as a public health issue.

More than an appearance issue

The conference organisers made an important point: body image is about much more than appearance. Body image influences how dancers think, feel and experience their bodies. It affects confidence, relationships with food and exercise, recovery from injury, training experiences, participation and long-term wellbeing. The conference vision challenged unrealistic body ideals and promoted dance cultures that support healthy relationships with food and bodies while recognising that every body is a dancer's body.

Several sessions highlighted how body image is shaped by dance environments rather than emerging solely from individual characteristics. For example, Romy Ashmore-Hills presented findings from workshops with 339 young dancers across eight dance styles, showing how pressures relating to comparison, perfectionism and appearance often intensify as training environments become more intensive. The Hungry2move project also raised important questions about which bodies are welcomed and represented within dance spaces, and whose are not.

These findings echo broader research showing that body image develops through interactions between individuals and their social environments (e.g., Frew & Langdon, 2026; Liu, 2026; Maruschi et al., 2026).

When environments become risk factors

Perhaps the most compelling example comes from research on mirror use in ballet training.

Mirrors are a familiar feature of many dance studios and are often viewed simply as technical learning tools. However, recent research by Radell and colleagues (2026) examining mirror exposure in ballet classrooms suggests the picture is more complex. Dancers in fully mirrored environments relied more heavily on visual self-correction and peer comparison, whereas dancers in settings with reduced mirror exposure described focusing more on bodily sensations and movement experiences.

Most importantly, the effects were not the same for every dancer. Radell et al.'s study also found that dancers who began the semester with lower appearance satisfaction experienced increased overweight preoccupation following a semester of full mirror exposure. Conversely, dancers with lower appearance satisfaction in the reduced mirror condition showed decreases in overweight preoccupation over time.

The message is not that mirrors are inherently harmful. Rather, the study highlights a broader safeguarding lesson: Environmental features can interact with existing vulnerabilities in ways that increase or decrease risk. This is exactly the type of thinking that underpins public health approaches to safeguarding. Instead of asking only how we support individuals, we also examine how environments contribute to positive or negative outcomes.

Prevention rather than crisis response

Another recurring theme throughout the conference was prevention. Sessions on RED-D, nutrition, injury, growth and maturation repeatedly highlighted the importance of addressing problems early rather than waiting for significant difficulties to emerge. For example, discussions around nutrition emphasised that under-fuelling may arise for very different reasons. In some cases, it may reflect body image pressures or appearance concerns. In others, it may result from intense schedules, practical barriers or uncertainty about nutritional requirements. Different causes will likely require different solutions.

Similarly, Zoë Harwood and Dr Kerry John Rees discussed The Body Project: Dancers, an adaptation of the widely researched Body Project programme designed to challenge appearance ideals and support healthier relationships with bodies, food and self-image before serious difficulties develop.

The underlying principle is a simple one: If environments help create problems, then environments must also be part of the solution.

A different way of thinking about safeguarding

One question from the conference has stayed with me:

At what point do dancers lose autonomy over their bodies?

Dance training inevitably involves correction, feedback and evaluation. However, the conference encouraged us to think critically about how environments influence dancers' relationships with their bodies.

• Who decides what the ideal dancer body looks like?

• What messages are communicated through feedback, casting decisions and organisational culture?

• What behaviours are rewarded?

• What assumptions become normalised?

These are body image questions, but they are also safeguarding questions. Our recent policy brief argues that many safeguarding-related harms arise not from isolated incidents alone but from interactions between individuals, relationships, organisational cultures and wider systems. Body image concerns offer a powerful example of this principle in practice.

A call to action

The final session of the conference focused on practical action and building healthier dance environments. That emphasis on action was important because it moved the conversation beyond awareness and towards responsibility. A safeguarding-by-design approach asks us to broaden our focus beyond responding to harm.

It encourages us to ask:

• What does our environment encourage dancers to focus on?

• Which attitudes and behaviours are rewarded?

• How do organisational practices influence body image and wellbeing?

• Do our systems support autonomy, health and participation?

• Are we paying as much attention to prevention as we are to incident response?

Our policy brief argues that safeguarding in dance should be recognised as a public health issue requiring coordinated, preventive action across the sector. The discussions at Body Perspectives: Re-evaluating the Ideal, alongside emerging research on body image, eating disorder prevention and dance training environments, reinforce an important message: Safer dance cultures do not emerge by accident. They are intentionally designed.

If we want healthier dancers and healthier organisations, we need to think not only about how we respond when harm occurs, but also about how we create environments that make harm less likely in the first place.

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Written by Prof Jennifer Cumming, Co-Director of the SPRINT Project

References

• Cumming, J., & Quinton, M. L. (2026). Making UK dance safer: Evidence-based policy recommendations for improving safeguarding and abuse prevention [Policy Brief]. University of Birmingham. https://figshare.com/s/d713a6e18d725b36811b

• Cumming, J., & Quinton, M. L. (2026). Safeguarding in dance as a public health issue: A systems-level policy framework [Policy Brief]. Frontiers in Public Health, Volume 14 - 2026, 1919552. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1919552

• Frew, L., & Langdon, S. (2026). The complex duality of body surveillance in dance: The helpful and harmful aspects of sociocultural environments. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 30(4), 587-596. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089313X251408723

• Liu, Y. (2026). When dance training harms: An autoethnography of institutional body surveillance in Chinese pre-professional dance education. Sport, Education and Society, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2026.2685031

• Maruschi, M. C., Zanini, G. D., Santorsula de Paula Oliveira, P. L., Telles de Lima, D., Correa, E. A., Verardi, C. E., Ferreira, C. C., Hernández-Beltrán, V., Gamonales, J. M., Espada, M. C., & Pessoa Filho, D. M. (2026). Psychosocial and body image variations in professional dancers: A prospective longitudinal observational study. Sports, 14(3), 99.

• Radell, S. A., Ramachandran, S. R., Adame, D. D., & Cole, S. P. (2026). Ballet, body image, and mirror exposure. Journal of Dance Education, 26(2), 126-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2025.2463453