Growing up girl in deprived areas – lived experiences, stakeholders and community work

During the last decade, neighbourhoods defined as “deprived areas” by the police has gained increasing interest from the media, politicians and scholars.

In discussions about these areas, girls and women are often absent, likely because they are much less involved in those violent and criminal acts primarily in focus in these discussions. At the same time, research show extensive neighbourhood effects on people’s lives. Place affects our identity making, our existence and the way we orientate ourselves.

Hence, focusing on girls’ living conditions and their lived experiences of these neighbourhoods as places is important for the development of a community social work that also includes girls. Thus, the aim of this study is to contribute with knowledge on girls’ lives in deprived areas.

This will be attained through two sub-studies. 1) by investigating how girls and young women growing up in deprived areas orientate themselves in relation to social context and social norms, and which societal stakeholders they identify as important in their lives, and 2) by investigating these societal stakeholders’ reasoning on girls’ living conditions in deprived areas.

The objective is that the knowledge produced will help develop community work in deprived areas.

The study has a phenomenological approach in that we understand the body and one’s lived experiences as the starting point for understanding the world. In light of this, the methodology is inspired by ethnography.

The first sub-study will be based primarily on teller-focused interviews with girls (13–19-years old), which will be supplemented with walk-alongs and visual ethnography.

The second sub-study will be based on semi-structured interviews with those central stakeholders identified in sub-study one.