Hi readers and Happy New Year! I have been quiet for a few weeks and this reflect a wildly busy time away from my desk! First in Mozambique working for DANIDA looking at how children can be mobilised to contribute to under-nutrition in the country and second having a GREAT time with my huge family over the festive season. Its refreshed and exhausted me in equal measure. I am ready for the new year and excited by the work ahead.
One of the things I would like to do more of this year is to invite associates to publish posts on my blog. Here is the first of these from Sarah Huxley. It focuses on adolescent girls and safe spaces. Many of you may know about or even use a tool I've described many times to diagnosing potential blocks to development projects. The tool asks users to assess four categories of components: knowledge, skills, motivation/inspiration and environment. When one of these is left out of or neglected in a project there is far less chance that the project will succeed (like a bus cannot move forward without all four wheels). In her article, Sarah focuses on a much neglected theme of providing girls with a type of environments for them to develop and feel able to participate. A link to Sarah is at the bottom of her post. Enjoy!
Adolescent girls and safe spaces: do we really know what we mean when we refer to these in international development?
Adolescent girls – a tremendous force for change within the ever turning wheel of development. Often girls aged 10-19 are labelled as agents of change in poverty reduction. I believe that understanding adolescent girls’ mobility and use of space (both formally and informally) is paramount in order to create an enabling environment, which can allow individuals/groups of girls to imagine a different life experience, and subsequently, act upon that vision.
The purpose of these musings, is therefore to emphasise the importance of creating ‘safe spaces’ as a first step in programming for adolescent girls; and to encourage us practitioners to really explore what we mean (and do) when we refer to a ‘safe space.’
An article by Madfis et al. (2010) from Save the Children notes that ‘safe spaces’ are a common component of humanitarian assistance, whereby they are often used as a stepping stone for restarting formal
The Population Council has done extensive work in examining the social isolation of young girls, particularly in relation to ‘out-of-school’ girls in rural Egypt and urban slums in Ethiopia. In both cases, adolescent girls have limited social networks and few places where they can meet peers, form new friendships, and acquire valued livelihood and life skills. Skills to develop are of course contextual and based on need, and vary from health advice, education (focusing on literacy and numeracy), skills training (including non-traditional skills), such as budgeting skills, to life skills, which focus on psycho social competencies, such as critical and creative thinking. These are facilitated in a number of ways by a female mentor, who focuses on active learning and reflection as key principles: through group discussion, role plays, surveys, creative expression, and so on.
Globally, girls’ lives are often restricted to the domestic sphere, where cultural norms and ‘rules of the game’ dictate that certain public spaces are ‘unsafe’ or ‘unacceptable’. Many of the public spaces that are seen as legitimate for girls – markets, washing areas, health clinics - are linked to their domestic roles of homemakers, whereas wider informal public spaces, such as recreation grounds often become gendered – a ‘man’s space’.
Furthermore, whilst schools can be very pertinent formal (institutionalised) spaces that girls are included within, they can also be spaces of violence, sexual harassment and bullying, as the 2006 UN Study on Violence Against Women indicates. Therefore creating a safe supportive space, which is neither at home nor school, is a vital addition in ensuring that adolescent girls have a platform from which to develop.
Examples of safe spaces include parks, ‘under a tree’, community centres, and homes of trusted community members. They can be single sex domains, such as the Population Council’s Biruh Tesfa centres in Ethiopia for out of school girls aged 10-19 from slum areas. Or they can also be integrated domains, as often in emergency situations, such as Plan International’s child friendly space in Jacmel, Haiti: it is in a small field just off an improvised camp, where children are involved in drawing, music classes, football, and board games. What is important is that they are spaces that the girls are involved in deciding upon, but that they also are culturally acceptable to parents/carers, and conveniently located. The point is that they should enable the transformation of how girls view themselves and enhance the perception of girls within their communities. This is often achieved through the medium of working through trained female mentors.
Furthermore, as Martha Brady of the Population Council (2003) notes, it is imperative to collect information on the challenges and constraints that girls face with their mobility in any given context. There are four key aspects of a girl’s life to investigate:
1. A girl’s time use and work load (where she goes, how, with whom, when etc.)
2. Her perspectives of key individuals in her life e.g. parents, teachers, community leaders, boys (this can be researched through focus groups, interviews, participant observation etc)
3. Her mobility pattern (this can be represented diagrammatically or as a survey)
4. Her expectations and life aspirations (using participatory techniques such as ‘future searches’)
‘Space’ is not simply an objective structure, but it is an interface laden with social relationships and meanings, which is continually being negotiated and reinvented. Therefore if discourses of empowerment and its cousin – participation are to be fully realised then where this takes place is of great significance. Maia Green (2010) notes, that if ‘participatory’ trainings are being facilitated in a classroom, then existing social relations of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘learner’ are recalled. In fact, if participation is to be fully realised, then it is ‘an exercise in mutual transformation’ (ibid: 12): whereby all participants and facilitator(s) should be both learning and teaching/informing. Therefore where one chooses to enable participatory practices is crucial, and they should be complimentary to places of formal schooling.
Much more, however remains to be explored in relation to the potential for safe spaces within development assistance. Does a girl’s own understandings of her many roles, as ‘daughter’, ‘wife’, ‘student’, ‘worker’ etc. have an effect on her mobility and which spaces she interacts with? How does the innovation that can arise in these safe spaces transfer back into schools and the home? What happens when members become adults – either culturally through marriage or by age? How inclusive are safe spaces? When should these safe spaces be inclusive of boys?
Copyright © Mia Collis
As the World Development Report 2007 stated, it is imperative that the development community broadens the opportunities for young people to develop skills and use them productively, and I believe creating safe spaces is one mechanism to do this.
I would love to hear your thoughts! All correspondence to Sarah Huxley via her website, on email sarahhuxley@hotmail.com and on Twitter (Moderator_SH1)
References
- Brady, Martha/ Population Council (2003) ‘Safe spaces for adolescent girls’ in Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health: Charting Directions for a Second Generation of Programming-Background Documents for the Meeting (7): 155-176
- Green, M. (2010) ‘Making Development Agents. Participation as a Boundary Object in International Development’ in Journal of Development Studies, 46 (7).
- Madfis, J. et al (2010) ‘Emergency Safe Spaces in Haiti and the Solomon Islands’ in Disasters, Volume 34, No. 3, July 2010, p. 845-864.
Thank you Sarah!
Next week I will be posting for you an impressive paper by Claire O Kane one of the leading thinkers and practitioners in children's participation work. The paper is called, 'Children’s agency and participation – its relevance for development, peace, and human rights: reflections on practice from diverse contexts.'
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