Can we think about safety, judgement and gender differently? Our article is out!

Our article on young women's experiences of judgement in public space is out!

Here's a map annotated by three young women in Crewe, UK that we included in our article. It shows how high streets are often considered male spaces by this group of young women.

We recently published a journal article in Gender and Development called ‘There’s nowhere for us’: spatial and scalar experiences of judgement amongst young women in the UK’. (You can access our article here, or get in touch with us)

In the article we talk about how young women experience judgement in public space on a range of different scales and in a range of different ways. Based on our research with three different groups of young women in the UK (from the Making Space for Girls and the Young Researchers-in-Residence projects we led at the LSE) we look at spaces like benches, playgrounds and high streets and see how these are often spaces where many young women feel out of place – sexualised as young women and stigmatised as teens. 

We also start off our article by proposing that a lot of what we talk about when we talk about 'women’s safety' is often an issue of (and therefore should be reframed as) judgement – a point that is really important to us and that we think about often in our work!

Here are a few of our favourite lines from the article:

“Social issues permeate and are reinforced by our physical worlds in ways which let people know if they are included and on what terms.” (225)

“The experience of fear is better represented under the umbrella of judgement [rather than safety] which now encompasses the fear that women may feel of being misrecognised as sexual objects; but equally as disruptive or disorderly [...] [Safety as a question of judgement] invites an inherently optimistic and inclusive conversation within gender – it does not amplify a narrative (of the lurking predator) that we know is neither true nor helpful, but instead addresses the compounded ways in which women’s rights to the city are curtailed by anticipated and actual misrecognitions.” (226)

"[High streets are] judgemental geographies, that women change themselves to accommodate, and move around, but also find excuses to wander along in.” (235)

“Our hope is that by highlighting different scales of inequality, our paper allows for a reading of space which calls for attentiveness and care when considering social and material inclusions within our cities.” (239) 

“Public space can be a contradictory space for teenagers: it offers both judgement and social exclusion, and a space for creating identities of inclusion amongst peers; it is a space where their presence is challenged but where they also learn to assert themselves through being there. The simple act of sitting on a bench can be under- stood as marking and claiming places as one’s own (Phadke, Ranade, and Khan 2009), a right to do nothing which challenges spatial hegemonies and allows young women to ‘acquire situated rights to spaces by dwelling with them’ (Pyyry 2016, 9).” (240)