Teenage girls and public space/facilities : an update

[makespaceforgirls]

I posted a while back about how rubbish my local council's reaction was when I pointed out that all of their park facilities for teenagers where predominantly used by boys.

Things didn't get any better, so I did some research. And then I co-opted my feminist lawyer friend, and now we're a campaigning group, hoping to be a charity soon. So welcome to Make Space for Girls.

Our website is here, and that will also give you our Twitter. We're on Facebook too.

We'd hoped to launch ourself with a pilot project working with teenage girls, but COVID has put the brakes on that - schools have enough to think about right now as it is.

Even so, we've had an amazing reaction from everyone we've spoken to, and these range from academics to big public bodies to architects. And everyone both agrees and can't believes that the problem hasn't been noticed before now. Well, everyone except my local council. Who are now going to be quite embarrassed as they are about to be our case study of the town which spent £175k on equipment for boys, and nothing for girls.

We will keep you posted! And if anyone wants to know more, there is a contact form on the website, or DM me here.

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?

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

oh and @Thelnebriati, can you DM me and tell me what park that is? Would be very handy as another case study. I also think Caroline Criado Perez might like to hear about that one!

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

makespaceforgirls

Sending positive vibes. Good luck.

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.

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.

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?

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.

@cheeseismydownfall

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?

I think so. The damned skate park I mentioned earlier? I recall the campaigning for it. It wasn't purely altruistic; it was to give the boys somewhere to go and something to scrawl with unsightly graffiti tags! to stop them being public nuisances down the shops.

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

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.

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).

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.

I can well understand why teenage girls self exclude from exercise in parks. There are specific parks I don't run in, as a grown woman, because of fear (justified - it's already happened!) of groups of teenage boys.

I definitely think female only classes and groups would be a huge encouragement. Like in the old days, when we used to have female swimming nights. Obviously these things tend to be targets now so easier said than done.

All that said, my local skate and bmx park is under 18s only and staffed brilliantly by youngish people who all the kids look up to. They strive to be inclusive and don't put up with poor behaviour from anyone. Whilst attendance isn't 50/50, I certainly see plenty of girls enjoying the facility.

makespaceforgirls, I have another question (you have really piqued my interest! It is a great project).

How do you think this and other similar projects can address the seeming contraction between not stereotyping things as "boys' activities" or "girls' activities", whilst also acknowledging that in reality, there does seem to be a difference that broadly breaks down over sex lines?

Notwithstanding the specific issues around safety etc, I can just imagine a smug councillor, when challenged about lack of provision for girls, triumphantly responding that I am being terribly sexist in my views and in fact girls can be just as good at skateboarding and bmx-ing as boys, don't you know?

@cheeseismydownfall Yes totally - round us the police provide some funding for skate parks.

I will come back and answer you and @Londonmummy66 (because the whole sport thing I find really interesting too) after both supper and then some online comedy which we are booked into.

But it is so good to have this conversation, and the questions are brilliant. We've only just started and really need as many perspectives as we can get.

I also remember your original thread and really glad to hear your brilliant update. Keep us posted!

Great research report and initiative!

I wonder what are the effects on girls' participation when other groups are also encouraged to use the spaces. Perhaps having a lot of teenage boys around is less intimidating if there are also more pensioners, parents with children etc. This can also substitute (to some extent) a lack of paid supervision of the spaces which the report mentions is generally too costly. I mention this as I spent some time in a mainland Chinese city some years back and I was quite impressed to see how many people - of all ages and both sexes - gathered in the local square in the evenings where they held different dance groups (I think the phenomenon is known in English as 'square dancing'). Obviously it is a very different cultural context, but perhaps there would be positive spillovers for girls' participation if a regular contingent of bowls-playing grannies and grandads can be rallied, for example

I remember your original thread and I think it’s a great initiative! Looking forward to hearing more.

Persistent you're absolutely right about school spaces.
I work in a school and worked really hard to divide up the spaces and timetabled girls football etc.
It worked really well for a while, until certain staff members decided that it was worth sacrificing the girls' spaces and times so that the group of alpha older boys could 'stay out of trouble' (this, despite the fact that 99% of fighting and swearing originated in football games)
It ended up with the boys claiming it was unfair and the playground went back to boys dominating and girls on the fringe because I was the only member of staff who cared to enforce it.
Occasionally the boys would 'let' the girls play. Their choice of words, 'let' 'permission' was illuminating.

I've actually read your research rather than skimming the webpage now I've had time. Really hope you can make some impact with your campaign.

Thank you everyone for the comments and support, it's so cheering.

My early teen dd no longer wants to go to the park, there’s nothing there for her, @SilenceIsNoLongerSuspicious. That's it in a nutshell. But we've put up with it for so long.

Yes, it very much applies to school playgrounds too, and I hope that we can make a difference to that, too, in the long run. The difference is that it isn't covered by the Equality Act, so making a case is reliant on goodwill rather than obligation.

@Londonmummy66 This whole barriers to sport thing I find infuriating. You are right, if girls don't go into the park in the first place they're unlikely to get involved in sport, and we are hoping to talk to Sport England about our campaign too. But I have bigger questions too. All the women I know exercise - running, cycling, yoga, pilates. But I don't know one single one who does competitive sport. Yet 'sport' is always presented to girls as something they have to do in an organised way. This is in part because the kind of women who are involved in Sport England come up through organised sport, but don't realise they are not typical. But mostly it's because that's how boys do sport, and no one has the imagination to realise that that's not the template for how everyone has to do it.

@WendyTestaburger and whoever else said about staffing. A staffed skate park is a completely different thing to one which is just plonked in the corner of a park and allowed to go feral. And it's great that girls do use it. But we still need to ask all girls what they want.

@talesofginza Yes, totally, and that's one way of making parks work better, by making them more populated and overlooked. But it also cuts the other way too. If you redesign parks to make them more attractive to girls, other groups (including some boys) benefit too.

@makespaceforgirls

oh and *@Thelnebriati*, can you DM me and tell me what park that is? Would be very handy as another case study. I also think Caroline Criado Perez might like to hear about that one!

Is there another way to contact you? DMs aren't secure.