On a typical Friday night, looking to relax after a week inschool, Ella and her friends tend to head into central Blackpool to rehearse at a studio.
‘We do some of our own original stuff, but also do covers of the Arctic Monkeys, the Beatles, and Foo Fighters,’ the 15-year-old tells Metro. ‘I sing and play bass guitar.’
But when the teenage musicians get ready to take the bus home, they make sure someone is always with them.
‘There’s an unspoken rule between all my friends that we never get the bus alone,’ Ella explains. ‘And you have to keep your wits about you and not put your headphones on. In winter, when it gets dark at 4pm, you have to come home early, if you’re not being picked up, because you can’t be at a bus stop in Blackpool at night.’
Such concerns for her safety aren’t unfounded. Last year, Blackpool was named the most dangerous major town in Lancashire, with 151 crimes per 1,000 people reported in 2023.
It’s also the second toughest place in the UK to be a girl and young woman, according to a recent report from Plan International UK. In first place is North East Lincolnshire.
The State of Girls’ Rights in the UK 2024 report, which was released last week, explored factors affecting the lives of girls and young women such as education, poverty, health, violence, and voice.
‘Over half told us they are uncertain and anxious about their future,’ Kathleen Spencer Chapman of Plan International UK, tells Metro. ‘Society has been increasingly telling girls that they can be and do anything, but they are frustrated and still held back by outdated stereotypes and unfair expectations.’
Spencer Chapman says that long standing challenges that girls have faced for decades like gender stereotypes and impossible standards, are being compounded by newer issues like ‘misogyny, discrimination, and bullying.’
Andrew Tate – who currently faces rape and human trafficking charges – is said to be influencing a worrying number of young boys and men with his negative views of women. So much so, the ‘Tate effect’ has led to schools implementing anti-misogyny lessons for their students.
Bridie, a 25-year-old young woman in North East Lincolnshire says that although opportunities for girls and young women are improving, it’s not fast enough.
‘Progress is slow,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a twin brother and even though we were raised the same, we were treated differently as a female and male. I am a strong character but there have been times where I’ve been upset about gender stereotypes and feeling pushed back, but I’ve carried on with the challenge. It’s a shame that girls and women are still having to deal with these issues.’
Bridie adds that although the town she lives in, Grimsby, has a great community, it is ‘quite run down in places’ and, like Ella and her friends, she worries about her safety.
‘The transport system in my local area is quite poor. Often you walk or bike because it’s more reliable, but then you’re increasing your risk by being alone,’ she explains. ‘I am forever getting bombarded by these worries and issues, and it’s exhausting.’
Meanwhile, Ella admits that she too has sometimes felt unsafe. At school when she was younger, if she saw a group of boys near a corridor, she’d go a longer, different way to avoid them.
‘You’d get whistled or laughed at, shoved, or they’d do this thing where they ping your bra straps,’ she explains, adding that she thinks that the boys behave this way because there’s a lack of things for them to do in Blackpool.
‘They’re getting in to all sorts of trouble because they haven’t got places to go,’ she says.
Along with her friends, Ella would like to see more female police officers in the town and have dedicated places to go to report harassment.
Passionate about feminism and politics, the teenager hopes to one day be a political journalist. As young as 12, Ella and her best friend would make feminist zines from cut-outs of old magazines and leave them in the bathrooms at school. ‘They [the zines] would be about equality of women and women being treated with the same respect as men,’ she says.
However, she believes that she and her peers ‘aren’t treated as being as intelligent as boys’, but rather as ‘peacekeepers’ when boys are misbehaving.
The schoolgirl adds that young women she’s met through United Group Alliance who take STEM subjects worry about following their passions because they’re afraid of what people, mostly young men, might think. An opinion backed up by Plan’s findings, which revealed a third fewer girls take a STEM subject at A-Level and girls’ GCSE performance was 30% lower.
‘A common theme I’ve found is that women feel scared to take STEM because they feel if they get a question wrong, they’re going to be treated as stupid, like they shouldn’t have even considered taking the course,’ explains Ella.
Plan’s research also found that girls living in the poor performing local authorities, are 65% more likely to be living in poverty, and expected to live six fewer years in good health over their lives in the 10 worst performing authorities, compared to the top 10 performing local authorities.
Labour MP Chris Webb, who represents Blackpool South, said he was ‘sadly unsurprised’ to see the city featured in Plan International UK’s new report. He told Metro: ”I believe there are some specific characteristics of our town that make problems like public sexual harassment more pronounced – such as being a destination for nightlife.
‘But it’s also clear that the multiple complex issues that have informed this study are products of broader issues in the town such as poverty and deprivation.
‘These issues are the result of years of neglect of our town from the previous government and they touch every area of my constituents’ lives.’
Mr Webb hopes to tackle anti-social behaviour as MP, an issue he feels has a huge knock-on impact on women’s street safety.
‘Many of the metrics used in this index are closely associated with deprivation – such as child poverty and life expectancy,’ explains Spencer Chapman. ‘Others are less linked – such as gender pay gap or stem uptake.
‘The point of this index is to measure the toughest places to be a girl, and it is no surprise that many of these places are also the most deprived in the country. Our report reflects how the identities of being a girl, combined with other factors such as poverty, can impact someone’s chance at getting ahead in life.’
However, the charity is keen to point it that the survey’s aim wasn’t to single out individual local authorities, but to show the scale of structural challenges face by both girls and young women. The indicators were aggregated and each local authority provided with a score, with 0 representing the worst possible outcome and 100 the best.
When it came to issues such as mental health, only two in five girls in the UK and young women are happy with their mental health.
Ella says: ‘I’m very passionate about more mental health support in schools, especially for young women. I have struggled a lot in the past and at current with my mental health but there should be more support for young women and for them to be treated seriously and not as if they’re overreacting or on their period.’
Teenager Evie also lives in Blackpool and says that ‘a lot of the time, women of lower or working class will be disrespected, especially in the north.’
Her plan to make sure she’s respected? Education.
‘If you take advantage of what you’re given and try your absolute best, I think you can manage to get anywhere you want to,’ explains the 14-year-old.
However, when the teenagers talk about education, they’re not just referring to core subjects such as maths and English. Evie says things like contraceptive education, are just as important.
‘When schools treat sex and relationships education as if it is normal, which it is, it becomes less of a big deal and more of just common practice,’ she says.
15-year-old Genna adds that she would love for boys to be educated about girls’ periods too.
‘Although they don’t get them, it affects people around them,’ she tells Metro.
Genna also often feels like social media has increased ‘boys’ expectations of what girls should look like’, something that rang true in the report too, with young women saying there is a pressure to conform to what a female ‘should’ look like, while 44% of girls admitting they felt the way they looked held them back.
‘If you want to wear makeup or you want to dress a certain way it should be because you want to and not because it’s what is expected of you from another gender,’ Genna says.
Despite the work yet to be done, Ella, Evie, Bridie, and Genna are hopeful that things can change, saying they have already noticed an effort to make the lives of girls better.
‘If there is a report on my children in the future, I feel like it would be a very different result,’ Ella says.
However, Spencer Chapman, while also hopeful, knows there is a long way to go.
‘Tired of empty words of empowerment, girls want to see real tangible change in their lives,’ she says. ‘However, our research shows that girls have little faith and trust in politicians and institutions to make this change a reality. Gender equality is long overdue.’
To find out more about Plan International UK, click here
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