Teenage girls and public space/facilities : an update

Spot on Londonmummy66 All the schools that look at this conclude that unless they manage playgrounds / activities, girls are usually pushed to the margins unless their needs are enabled.

Oh and unpopular as it will no doubt be on here - trying to dedicate all the public space for the teenage boys to keep them out of trouble is a false economy as the project I worked on found that some of the girls with nowhere to go will end up being trafficked around gang leaders (they go out with a mid status guy and are then made to sleep with higher status ones).

I think that this is brilliant. I did a bit of work with sport England once on the barriers for female sport and all they would talk about was women doing sport to make themselves look good for men/didn't want to mess their hair up and nothing at all about the fact that they invested nothing at all into spaces for girls. I'm really sorry to hear about how being pushed out of public space starts at primary school - at least when I was that young we had separate playgrounds for girls and boys - one equipped with skipping ropes and one with footballs. It might seem sexist but we did run around and come in from break looking as red faced as the boys.

This is great OP. Well done. I will be really interested to see further research on this.

And yes, persistentwoman is right - primary school playground (pre covid) was dominated by football. They even changed the role of the lovely playleader who made sure that there were a variety of games (ball games of all sorts, skipping etc) a few days a week, and employed her instead to manage the boys’ arguments over football games. Girls couldn’t join in (dd2 tried, it ended up with a ‘game’ of all the boys against her, being pelted hard with multiple balls) and so the girls ended up playing imagination games around the edges due to lack of physical space. I’m still really cross about it.

makespaceforgirls, do you think there is also an undercurrent of "needing to keep boys out of trouble" in some of the decision making around council's investing in skate parks etc? Is it seen as a higher priority because of a belief that bored boys cause a more visible problem than bored girls?

Excellent OP. I'd suggest that you see the same pattern being played out in school playgrounds and social spaces - both primary and secondary. The sport / large open spaces get taken over by boys and games of football, cricket etc. Some girls will join in dependent on the school ethos, but as they get older the spaces are usually dominated by boys playing games and girls retreating to the margins - sometimes literally pushed there by hard balls / running bodies.
Good schools notice this and put in place facilitated strategies to ensure ownership of the public space by both sexes and all age groups.

That’s all very interesting and rings very true to me. Thanks, OP!

My experience - my dd2 loves tennis, and we have council courts locally. There’s an informal rule that you stop playing if you can see people waiting for more than about 30 minutes, and that the first people on should be the ones to give up their court (there are several). My two dds waiting over an hour for a court several times last summer, because I wasn’t there to be assertive with the men playing competitive matches for hours who saw no reason to stop and let others have a go.

My early teen dd no longer wants to go to the park, there’s nothing there for her, apart from the swings (most of which are baby swings, so there’s often a queue for higher one). I’m fairly sure a climbing wall or maybe some challenging, high monkey bars or a zip wire would suit her, but there’s nothing like that, so she defaults to walking in to town to get a hot chocolate. All the research rings really true to me - she’d love a dance space, and a chatting space, and ideally a soft surface for random splits / other acro moves.

makespaceforgirls

Sending positive vibes. Good luck.

I really enjoyed that research. It hit on so many things from my own childhood and the way I accessed park provision. Will follow with interest.

This sounds like a fantastic piece of work. Thank you, congratulations and good luck!

Here's a bit more about the park in Malmo, where young women and girls were consulted
charter-equality.eu/exemple-de-bonnes-pratiques/urban-planning-on-girls-conditions.html

I'm interested in what you can provide. In theory, these areas eg. Skateparks are for both boys and girls, but in practice the boys intimidate the girls out of using them.
Are you allowed to specify they are just spaces for girls because I can see anything remotely fun being overrun by boys?

It's known that if women are included more in the design of towns, towns look very different. With things like more seating, wider pavements, better lighting. Women aren't included at often enough, nor go into careers that influence this often enough.

This sounds like a solution to the same problem at an earlier age. Brilliant idea OP.

Are you a charity?

Re: equipment

A family friend won a silver medal the first time women had rowing events in the Olympics. They didn't have trainers who knew how to train women and their boats and equipment were excess club boats for the men - wrong weight etc. They competed in a boat that was far too heavy.

After their Olympic success, manufacturers were actually interested in building boats that fit the women. The rowers acquired dedicated trainer time in the national squad and training from people with more sex-specific knowledge of sports physiology. iirc, they went on to win the gold in the following World Championships.

On a totally different level, lots of kayak and canoe clubs don't have adequate equipment to fit the non-men paddlers. And then they wonder why so many people give up the sport.

I'm not a teenager but when I'm out in my kayak on my local canal (a public space), I have to watch out for harassment by:
aggressive fishermen (rarely women);
drunks on the water who are on various platoons and start chasing me (it's a narrow canal);
teenagers throwing things at me.
DH paddles the same water and doesn't have anything like the same experience.

People will say budget cuts but having professional staff on hand within set hours (and fine if they’re mostly drinking tea in the office- I’m not suggesting patrols!) is essential to maintaining really good play areas and in play areas I have visited in two London boroughs these have been in place. Someone to go to if there’s an issue.

The research section is really good, and my goodness, they're absolutely right.

I hadn't ever thought about it before, but as a teenage girl, I did start being more careful about using little football pitches. I loved football but I stopped using a leisure area because it was next to the local skateboard park where crowds of male yoof gathered, who tried to show off in front of their friends by sexually harassing any nearby girls.

All the girls did, thinking about it. We preferred to play football in the street because there were nearby adults.

I can't believe I've never realised all this before. We just adjusted our lives around abusive teen boys without articulating why were doing it.

One is to improve the design of existing parks to make them more welcoming to girls, and to
prevent boys from dominating the spaces. Proven ways of doing this include:
• better lighting;
• pathways all around the perimeter of the area;
• more seating areas, preferably with seats which face each other;
• more swings;
• wider entrances in and out of areas;
• breaking down play areas into smaller spaces;
• Good, safe toilet provision