Teenage girls and public space/facilities : an update

I feel very lucky. There was a big campaign locally a few years ago and the main park was redesigned. Yes there’s a skate park... but there’s also a play park with equipment suitable for use by adults too - zip wires, many types of swing, a huge climbing thing. There’s also tennis and mini golf, and an excellent coffee shop which sells the tokens for golf. Plus the huge field.
It’s used by all age groups and although boys might dominate the skate park area, the mixture of other age groups means girls are not excluded.

I’ve shared your research with a local fitness group which was originally for women only (aged 13-80.+) it does now have a male group. They recently bid for use of a council sports field for a variety of outside community sports use, (running track, cross fit, gym, kick boxing etc) but lost out to a football club.... we already have multiple football clubs in the town 🙄but apparently there’s still a shortage... oh the irony the female group has 300+ paid members!

Op I'm going to email you today, I volunteer for an organization that would love to publish you on our website.

This thread seems highly related, especially the UN safe spaces campaign

Almost all young women in the UK have been sexually harrassed www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4187958-Almost-all-young-women-in-the-UK-have-been-sexually-harrassed

@makespaceforgirls I'm in bucks. It's a small town near Aylesbury and I expect a large amount of the extra money the parish council is receiving is HS2 bung money hs2 passes very very close by. My dds go to school in this parish, we live just outside but are equally blighted and have lost most of our countryside walks.

Funnily enough, I asked younger dd (13, often meets with her friend for "exercise", either up a tree in the park in our village or in the stream in her friends village) what she thought our park needed and she said a climbing frame for big kids. The village park here has a kiddy playground, basket ball net, outdoor gym, small skate ramp and tennis courts🤔

This is so interesting and I'm writing this with the intention of coming back later. In our village an upgraded skate park has just been commissioned, I suspect with S106 money, very expensive, group of teen boys got together and drove the whole thing which was impressive but no one, me included to my shame, thought about it from a gender equality perspective.

My daughter joins in with the boys in riding bikes and scooters, she's 13 and the only girl in their year 8 group and most of the boys are supportive, but a few have been downright nasty and I'm not sure how much longer she'll continue to fight for her space in the group.

She is involved in a girls football team, which us fantastic and the local teams commitment to girls teams has really increased female participation locally. The FA female football drive seems to have been led by universities and although we're still driving quite a way for matches the number of girls teams has increased noticeably over the last 3 years. Dd tried rugby at school and enjoyed it, I looked for local girls teams and there was close to nothing.

Going to go away and think about what can be done locally for girls.

The timing of this thread is great, the parish council here are looking at replacing the old decrepit skate park with... a new skate park, a MUGA or outdoor gym equipment.

@lottiegarbanzo you can, but their Head of Year is an alpha male PE teacher and encourages them.

Fantastic work OP. You've identified a gap in our public facilities, and have taken concrete steps to address it. Future generations of girls will benefit from the work you've doing.

Can't you ban ball games during covid? (So while the smaller-than-usual year-group spaces apply). Presumably it's ball games i.e. football, that are causing / enabling the boys to take over the year-group space?

Isn't there an obvious safety issue there? Ball games in a too-small shared-use space presenting trip hazards to everyone else?

This is such exciting research. I'm a secondary teacher and whilst covid rules are in place at break and lunch our students have to be outside. What has happened is the boys take over the allocated year group space and the girls hang out at the edges (or sneak in an hang out in the toilets because it's too cold to stand still). One day I told them to go climb the really awesome tree next to the boys' football pitch. First they said 'do what Miss?' a few tried and had a blast but then they (and I!) got told off because it's 'too dangerous' and 'unseemly' in their skirts (knee length so not short-short). We make the girls wear skirts by the way... they have to identify as trans to be allowed to wear trousers.
Sports kit for girls is a big barrier to sport as well on that note. They are harassed for wearing leggings - either being told (usually implicitly but not always) they are asking for it ('distracting') in tight clothing or getting snarky comments about the size of their bums/legs or the boys giving them not too subtle marks out of ten.

Wider swings.... I remember once my hips and backside filled out at puberty, swings dug in ...

With this in mind, I've been looking at our local provision and council leisure strategy. Would you believe... the teen-specific provision is skate parks, basketball pitches and BMX tracks.

Looking at the leisure strategy, what hits me is that it is largely about sport and that means organised sport, with governing bodies, who can be consulted. Skateboarding is shoehorned in to that. A lot of this sport takes place in parks but countryside and nature is a separate strategic area.

What I notice is that physical leisure activities that are not formal sport, don't get much of a look-in. So doing yoga in the park, showing your friends your gymnastic moves on the adult exercise-trail equipment, informal scooting, cycling and roller-skating, would seem to fall between the strategic cracks. I'm reading on, to check how true that is.

It strikes me that there's big overlap with the roles sport and leisure so often play here on the relationship board. That is, men's sport is formalised, team-based or goal-oriented. They're a member of a cricket, rugby or football team (so have to turn out every Saturday, all afternoon, or they'd be letting people down). Or they're training for a marathon or trying to beat some specific Strava cycling goal. Yes, women do those things too but not in such great numbers, or without considering taking a break during the baby and toddler years.

Women's leisure activities are often less well-defined, more varied and more social. That can include the physical, exercise-related ones. They might go to classes, maybe try different ones from time to time, like walking with friends, go swimming when they can fit it in.

In the relationships-board context, I often think that the widows need to say 'well my important hobby is socialising with my friends, visiting shops, cafes and sometimes swimming. I need five hours a week to devote to this, or I'm letting them and myself down. This will happen on Wednesday evening and Saturday morning, so you're fine to have the kids then aren't you, good.' But because their leisure activities are less formal and more flexible, it is easy for both them and their partners to regard them as less important and as things that happen only if there's time left after everything else is done.

I think you're noticing the spatial equivalent of this phenomenon.

This is a fascinating thread and a brilliant campaign, well done!

Growing up in the 80s, I can also attest to the school playground being dominated by boys. There was a large tarmac ‘pitch’ marked out for netball or football and a much smaller paved area with concrete benches. The pitch was always used by boys and if any girls dared to cross it or try and use it, they would be punched, kicked or have balls kicked at them. Like another poster, on one occasion some teacher decided to force the inclusion of girls but it ended with us having cricket balls, tennis balls and footballs ‘accidentally’ hitting us in the face.

This thread has really made me think about the provision of play areas and next time I’m at one of the local parks, I will take a look.

This is ticking over in my mind, so another thought. The crime prevention element of providing facilities for teenage boys, youths, is very real. Far better have them loitering at a skate and basketball park, in plain sight (and maybe the design intention is for them to be visible, not vigilant), than doing graffiti, drugs, stealing cars or something (though how loitering at skate parks prevents selling and doing drugs, or planning other escapades, I'm not sure).

But, isn't this idea predicated on some rather old-fashioned notions of what the youths would be doing otherwise? That marauding outdoors in groups is the natural way of youths? That's very pre-digital. Wouldn't many of them be at home playing computer games, remotely, together, now?

I'm thinking of the reasons scouts and cubs became mixed-sex. Because not enough boys wanted to do all that active, practical, outdoor-focused stuff any more.

Girl-Guiding has not had that problem. They're probably not always as outdoor-focused as Scouts but do do camping, outdoor games in summer, trips to climbing walls and adventure activity places. Plus, girls have chosen to join Cubs and Scouts.

That seems to make a case that girls are more interested in doing sporty, outdoor, group activities than boys. Not less.

So I do think that there is a flawed, outdated assumption at the base of focusing outdoor activity provision on boys and youths, which is that the natural habitat of youths, especially the troublesome ones, is outdoors. Beyond that, far more broadly, that the natural inhabitants of urban outdoor space, whose use of that space can be managed by design, are male.

Perhaps things have now switched around? Teenage boys are now more likely to stay at home, with their tech, while teenage girls are more likely to gather in real-life groups, so are the more natural inhabitants of outdoor public space.

I know our Council's youth services provide a lot of indoor activities, music and digital things which seem more in line with what teenagers want.

Then though, there's the concern that everybody should have the opportunity to get some exercise. But isn't gym fitness more appealing to most teen boys and young men? Those not already involved in team sports, or uninterested in any sport at all. The sub-set of teen boys actually interested in the type of outdoor, public-space provision offered, seems small.

make space and/or time for girls, perhaps? Like women only swimming hours.

I can see an issue emerging around this in the current climate.

Make space and/or time for girls, perhaps? Like women only swimming hours. Perhaps girl only skating sessions, or a recognised women's night on the pitch and make sure it gets used?
I love the idea of a stage, and that girls have been asked for ideas.

Brilliant work, OP. I'm a lifelong feminist and well aware of the benefits of outdoor exercise. But even so, I was wondering why girls needed different provision. Your research section was an eye opener. I just hadn't thought about it that way before.

And now I'm starting to remember how I loved playing in parks and other public green spaces with my friends when I was a child -- but I have no similar memories from my teenage years...

Best of luck with this important campaign.

makespaceforgirls.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Make-Space-for-Girls-Summary-of-Research-findings-December-2020-web.pdf

I agree wholeheartedly about competitive sport.
My DD (14) was very successful in her chosen sport and hated school PE lessons. She asked if she could take a lesson one day and did a pilates class for the group. Every single person joined in and enjoyed it.

She had done it because there were 2 girls who were never able to join in anything and were always just told to keep the score or set up/clear away. These 2 girls joined in and enjoyed the class. Unfortunately DD was only allowed to do it once.

what a brilliant initiative this is, and all based in real, provable research.

thank you for driving this on OP

Oh school playgrounds, yes. I was lucky as a child that my primary school had enough, differentiated outdoor spaces to allow everyone space for a range of physical activities. This has been a problem in the past year though, with playgrounds sub-divided into small 'bubble areas'. Are you collecting material on school playgrounds OP?

As pp mentioned, this stuff affects the 'non sporty' boys too. The ones who don't play football, or skateboard but might enjoy tennis, climbing, swimming etc. I think a lot of the 'enjoy exercise but not team sports' boys and girls are the ones who get into running as adults.

Part of the problem is the way that, in (state) schools especially but not only, sport is often seen as the antithesis of academic activity. With limited resources the staff focus attention only on the top sports performers. Pp's point about needing to provide different activities for the less talented kids, not poor versions of the same old team sports, really rings true, from my own secondary experience. The idea that the very academically focussed ones really need exercise that suits them, to stay healthy, help control stress levels and keep them on an even keel isn't always there.

It would be brilliant if your campaign could mobilise material to make use of changes experienced during lockdown, as a springboard for change. Similar to the shift in perspective that followed foot and mouth in 2001, which brought to the fore the fact that leisure uses of the countryside were far bigger, economically, than farming. That changed some of the land management initiatives the government was willing to pay for (not just to provide access directly but to support wildlife and other public goods).