[URBAN NOTE] "Creating Girls’ Spaces in Toronto Community Centres Isn’t That Simple"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist features a report by Viviane Fairbank on creating girls' spaces in Toronto community centres, complicated by the question of what such spaces should be.

Last year, a few dozen girls aged 13 to 18 sat in colourful, decorated rooms in four different community centres across Toronto and spoke to researchers from Social Planning Toronto. The centres, ranging in location from North Kipling to Scarborough, were host to Toronto’s newest youth spaces funded by the City. As similar establishments were being built across the GTA, researchers wanted to learn about the initiative’s successes and shortfalls.

But a previous report from that year, led in part by SPT, had omitted young women’s perspectives from its evaluation. The report’s leaders had done so inadvertently, as is so often the case: they had simply spoken to a majority of boys and taken their responses as universal.

Now, SPT returned to the community centres to determine whether, as suspected, researchers would gather “other information” by speaking to the girls who used the space. Let’s call it a well-meaning afterthought.

Two weeks ago, SPT published its results [PDF]. For the most part, they were unsurprising: young women had a lot to say. But the girls were also remarkably traditional in their understanding of femininity. For the most part, their suggestions for girl-friendly spaces did not allow for a richer, more inclusive future for Toronto’s young women. Instead, they painted a stark picture of today’s teenage girls, and prompted questions about just how to respond.