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Girls in Britain are becoming more miserable, suggests the Children’s Society’s annual report. Among 10 to 15-year-old girls, the charity’s report says 14 percent are unhappy with their lives as a whole, and 34 percent with their appearance. Researchers were told of girls feeling ugly or worthless. The figures for England, Wales and Scotland for 2013-14 represent a sharp rise in unhappiness on five years before.By contrast the study found that boys’ sense of happiness remained stable.

The charity’s annual Good Childhood Report, now in its 11th year, draws its findings on teenagers’ happiness from the Understanding Society Survey which gathers data on 40 000 households across the UK.

Children’s Society and University of York researchers examined responses on the well being of 10 to 15-year-olds.

They found that between 2009-10 and 2013-14 on average 11 percent of both boys and girls said they were unhappy.

But the latest available figures, for 2013-14, showed the proportion of girls saying they were unhappy had risen to 14 percent.

Lucy Capron from the Children’s Society told BBC Radio 5 Live: “This isn’t something which can be explained away by hormones or just the natural course of growing up, actually this is something that we need to take seriously and we need to address.”

The proportion of girls reporting being worried about their looks rose from 30 percent for the period as a whole, to 34 percent in the year 2013-14 — while the proportion of boys unhappy with their appearance remained unchanged at 20 percent.

Three girls tell BBC Radio 5 Live how they feel. Megan (12) said: “The only time that I’m not happy is if people are judging me or being mean and things like that. With people at school, they post things (on social media) and they try and make everyone think that they are perfect.

“Sometimes it makes me feel — not annoyed — but I don’t want to look at it any more because they just do it all the time and it gets on your nerves.”

Natalia (15) said: “Everywhere you look it’s like, celebrities: thin, blonde or — perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect eyes, perfect eyebrows. And it’s just crazy and I just feel like I should look like that — even though I know it’s all like fake, or a lot of it is anyway.

“I have these days when I’m like, I don’t care what people think but then somebody will say something and it will just hit me again and I’ll feel worse but I don’t know, it’s hard to explain why it bothers me so much sometimes.”

Caitlyn (12) said: “I am happy most of the time, but then when it comes to my friends going: ‘Ah I look really beautiful in this outfit’ and everything, I just feel like, no, I can’t do that — I can’t pull it off.

“When I’m obviously looking through my Facebook and looking at some of the posts, all you can see is pictures of celebrities and my friends looking beautiful in selfies and everything, and then there’s just me, like, I can’t get away from any of it.”

While teenage angst is nothing new, Ms Capron said: “What’s new and what the Children’s Society have unveiled is the scale of the problem — particularly the fact that the gap between boys and girls is getting wider and that’s something that we should be worried about.” — BBC News.