Girlguiding Report

In my mind at least, Girlguiding should be about fun, bake-offs and camping (and I say this as the mother of a long-time guide who has done all of these things, with the additional bonus that they taught her to wash up). But it’s an indication of where we are now, that the publication of their annual Girls Attitudes Survey is important for everyone who works in women’s and girls’ safety.

There are two reasons for this. One is that not enough people are talking to teenage girls about their experience of life (Plan International being the honourable exception here). But the other is that Girlguiding are very good at asking the right questions, and don’t feel the need to sugar coat the results. Which is why this year’s report has the subtitle “sexism, misogyny and the power of sisterhood”.

And they are not joking about that. The headline results are pretty shocking.

• Over half of girls and young women (56%) don’t feel safe on public transport.

• 86% have avoided going out at night to stay safe, and this is worse for girls from marginalised groups.

• And 68% have changed their everyday behaviour in the last year to avoid sexual harassment.

• 10% have missed or avoided school for this reason.

I will be sharing all of these statistics in presentations from now on.

But there are some good bits too – hence the sisterhood in the title. 92% feel safe with their friends and 70% of them have stood in solidarity with a girl experiencing sexism or misogyny.  Which is a bitter-sweet statistic really.

But why I particularly like this report, of all the ones that Girlguiding have produced over the last few years, is that it’s naming the problem, calling it out as misogyny.

This isn’t teenage boys being boys, or girls being fearful, it’s a real problem that these girls and young women are having to bend their lives around.

I think there are a lot of organisations who could learn from that.

And we all need to. That’s the lesson from another piece of research which came out last week. In Australia, Monash University found that when teenage girls experienced harassment on public transport, that affected them for the rest of their lives – making them feel less safe, more anxious, and less likely to use public transport.

So it’s never a joke, it’s literally life changing.  So let’s do something about it.

Read the report