It's the shrieks and giggles that hit you first. Inside a small building in central Hackney, a group of 15 girls shout and jostle, leopard-skin hair bands and flashing hairgrips defying their drab school uniforms. At Hackney Young Women's Group, girls are heard as well as seen. Once a week they meet for three hours, discussing everything from sexual health and domestic abuse to healthy eating and careers. Not one of them looks left out.
This project might be thriving, but there is a fear that girls-only spaces are dying out. Once the mainstream, single-sex groups now have to be justified. Giants in youth work such as UK Youth and Clubs for Young People started as single-sex, but are now mixed. In a world where gender equality has supposedly been achieved, youth workers are saying that their funding is being ringfenced and siphoned off for "real" problems - knife crime, gang work and substance abuse - most of which involves boys.
"Female-only space has been stolen," according to Jean Spence, a former youth worker who now researches girls' work at Durham University. "Saying that you want to hold a single-sex event almost feels like a risky thing to say. This space isn't going to be offered back to us - it's up to the grassroots to reclaim it."
Sure enough, there are signs of a resurgence in girls' work. In September, UK Youth held a female-only conference in Leeds to discuss girls' groups. The response was phenomenal. Almost 100 women attended the conference from as far away as Scotland, Cumbria and Ireland. Clearly, the meeting tapped into a wider feeling among practitioners that something has to be done.
"We were only expecting about 40 people, but we ended up turning people away," says Ruth Gilchrist, a training and development officer for UK Youth, which helped organise the conference. "Because girls' groups are increasingly having to justify themselves, they're realising how much good work they do and how much they have to say."
Better vibes
There is something of a paradox here. Girls' groups might be being cut out and mixed with boys, but, on the ground, some youth workers are reporting an increased demand for single-sex services. Girlguiding UK, celebrating its centenary this year, has a notoriously long waiting list, and local authorities are also rethinking their approach to young women's work.
As Clare Crawford, service manager of Hackney Youth Service, explains: "When I arrived in 2007, less than one per cent of our youth services were female. We held a young women's event to find out why, and the feedback was that they didn't want the provisions because the activities were mainly for boys. Since we've been holding these girls-only sessions, young women's involvement has grown to about 20 per cent, and it's increasing all the time."
No one knows exactly how many girls-only groups are operating in the UK, but a report earlier this year on the women's voluntary and community sector from the Women's Resource Centre identified 751 organisations in operation, just over half of which were delivering services to girls and young women. However, there are no centralised statistics on statutory provision to add to these figures, and many groups operate autonomously under umbrella organisations. Girlguiding UK, for example, is made up of more than half a million girls attending small groups across the UK.
So what then makes these single-sex spaces so attractive? Two 17-year-old girls from the Young Women's Group in Hackney, Nicolette Miller and Chantelle Beckford, explain their reasons for attending.
"There are better vibes in an all-women's group," says Chantelle, "Boys can make you feel uncomfortable - they're always after your phone number and they question everything. Here you don't have the hassle - you can talk about anything."
Nicolette agrees: "Girls' groups should be promoted to more people, I think it's something a lot more girls would like to do."
"Coming here has definitely changed me as a person. Before I spent all my time sleeping, after this I think it's good to do things, volunteering work and stuff. I've learned to speak openly in a group and to present myself - that really helped when I started work experience this summer."
Providing girls-only spaces does not mean that mixed work is unimportant; in fact it can help complement mixed-sex groups by giving young women the confidence to try youth projects in the first place. Nor does it mean that only activities thought of as "girlie" are on offer. Girlguiding UK, for example, offers climbing, kayaking and even motorcycle maintenance workshops.
As Jo Hobbs, ranger leader for Girlguiding in Tooting, explains: "This is not about keeping girls in a little pen and not seeing the value of mixed-sex work; it's saying that sometimes girls need a supportive environment to express things openly, and this can be easier in a girls-only space."
"There's more pressure on girls now from the teenage years - they have to grow up fast, with high expectations and early sexualisation. That's why it's really important to give them the space to talk about these issues. When our group meets we talk about drugs, sex, boys and from time to time we just mess around like little kids. The girls just wouldn't do all that in front of boys. They wouldn't feel comfortable."
Hope for a revival
Hobbs first joined the Brownies when she was seven as an escape from a harsh mixed school where the boys bullied her. Like the girls she works with today, she saw the Guides as a safe space where she could be herself: "Many of the issues the girls face now are the same as 100 years ago, it just takes different forms. Bullying is still around, for example, but takes place through mobile phones as well as in the playground."
According to Spence, it is not the need for girls-only spaces that has diminished, but the amount of time and resources youth workers have to provide it. She points out that the National Organisation of Girls' Clubs, which has evolved into UK Youth, started as a single-sex group but became the National Association of Girls' Clubs and Mixed Clubs in 1944, and then lost its Girls Unit in 1987. Moves like this don't just leave less space for girls-only work, they also reduce opportunities for female youth workers to meet each other and listen to young women's demands. "Youth workers have less freedom to set the agenda on the ground with young people," says Spence. "Women used to be able to talk to girls about what they wanted, now they have to be responsive to policy directives. There used to be 11 or 12 women's worker groups in the North East, now there is just one."
The conference, however, has rekindled some hope of a revival, even though one of the hot topics on the day was the difficulties girls' groups encounter when trying to find funding. But the women attending are determined to keep up the fight, and there is talk of establishing a more permanent network of young women's groups. As Spence put it: "The initiative among women workers is starting to grow. There is an absolute hunger for girls' work, and we want to do something about it."
GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN
Twenty-one years ago, Sue Dare, a PE teacher with an interest in outdoor education, founded the charity Getaway Girls. She believed her young members would have a more positive experience if she kept it girls only.
Over the years the Leeds-based group found that its single-sex space works brilliantly for helping a whole range of groups open up, including teenage mums, young women in care, women from ethnic minorities and young offenders.
"The girls say they like this space," says Georgia Cooper, the director of Getaway Girls who has been involved with the organisation for 12 years. "They don't have the pressure of what they need to be in front of boys. They behave in different ways."
Although Getaway Girls is supported mainly through charitable donations, it has had to adapt its mission to receive funding from local authorities. When applying for a grant on knife crime, Cooper thought it would be a good idea to involve boys at the end of the project. "I'm not sure whether we would have won the bid otherwise," she says.
For some of the 250 young women Getaway Girls works with every year, this single-sex environment is the only chance they get to engage in adventurous activities like kayaking, sailing and motorbiking. For other more vulnerable groups, it is simply a chance to relax and put to one side the challenging situations they face. As Louise, a 16-year-old mother, puts it: "They must have saved the NHS thousands on anti-depressants."
