Girls' quality of life shows huge variation in England and Wales

There are huge discrepancies in the quality of life for girls depending on where in the country they live, according to a new report, which has found that Middlesbrough is the worst area to be a girl in England and Wales and Waverley in Surrey is the best.

The report, produced by Plan International UK in conjunction with the University of Hull, revealed large discrepancies across the country, with inner-city areas performing the worst.

The researchers compared all local authority areas in England and Wales on five markers – childhood poverty levels, life expectancy, teenage conception rates, GCSE results and percentage of girls aged under 18 not in employment, education or training.

The 10 worst local authorities to be a girl, according to the report, are Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Knowsley, Hastings, Kingston upon Hull, Salford and Sandwell.

The 10 best areas are Waverley, Rushcliffe, Chiltern, Mole Valley, Epsom and Ewell, Rutland, Elmbridge, Wokingham, St Albans and East Hertfordshire.

Comparing some measures revealed how significant the discrepancies were between areas. On the issue of teenage conception, Tamworth in Staffordshire showed the highest result in England and Wales, with 40.5 per 1,000 girls aged under 18 becoming pregnant in 2013 – the year used in the report – compared with 7.6 per 1,000 in St Albans.

Similarly, life expectancy for girls born between 2012 and 2014 ranged from 86.7 in Chiltern to 79.8 in Middlesbrough.

“Our research found that overall the UK is failing girls,” said Lucy Russell, the UK girls’ rights campaign manager for Plan International UK and lead author of the report.

“It’s clear that despite being one of the richest, most developed countries in the world, girls don’t have equal rights and equal life chances across the UK,” she said.

Russell condemned the assumption that because Britain was wealthy it was necessarily meeting its obligations to protect girls, saying that not only were there issues relating to poverty, which the report was able to examine quantitatively, but other issues affecting girls’ chances for which there was not robust data to measure, such as sexual harassment, gender stereotyping at schools and workplaces and online harassment.

“We found it hard to get really accurate data on girls’ rights at a local level. There are large gaps; for example, when we looked at violence against women data, it was available at a police force level but not at a local authority level. We also found that sexual assault offences weren’t always recorded by age, gender and place, so it became hard to map what was happening for girls. There was a wide range of data we would have liked to have collected – self-harm and suicide by local authority, cyberbullying – it’s very hard to paint a picture,” said Russell.

To address this, the report included interviews with 103 girls to ask about their experience of life in Britain, which Russell said painted a “national picture of their concerns”.

“What we’ve heard from girls in our research is that girls are facing daily harassment in school – in the classroom and on the way to and from school. They need to use technology, but they don’t always feel safe to do that. They’re scared every day on the street, they have certain things they don’t do and places they don’t go,” said Russell.

In particular, the report pointed to research conducted earlier this year, which found that 22% of British women experienced unwanted sexual contact in or around school as girls and the fact that reports of sexual offences in UK schools had more than doubled in recent years.

Emma, 19, was one of those interviewed for the Plan UK report. She is from Bridlington, east Yorkshire, and now lives in Huddersfield where she is studying music.

“People think we have equal rights and that we’re equal to men, but we’re just not,” said Emma.

She said that while she mostly felt safe in Bridlington, she was constantly aware that she could be cat-called. “I walked home the other day and a group of young boys shouted at me to get my arse out and my tits out,” said Emma. “It was daytime, it would have been about 3pm and they were about 14. And I got home and I was crying to my mum. It made me so angry, because why should I cry because of something a 14-year-old boy says? But it’s the principle behind the action. How can I be equal to men if that still happens?”

Emma says she would like to see girls’ rights discussed more and girls represented.

“Girls’ rights are so important. Most of the time they’re just overlooked. There’s so much stuff that happens to girls that’s just not known about. Someone needs to say something. There needs to be some sort of voice that represents us,” she said.

A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to building a country that works for everyone – no girl should be held back in life just because of her gender or where she lives. We have given schools clear guidance on ‎sex and relationship education and products to help them discuss body image with their pupils, so they can learn to respect themselves and others.

“Teenage pregnancy rates are at the lowest level for 40 years and we are driving down child poverty, with the number of children living in workless households at a record low. But we want to do more which is why we are encouraging more young people, particularly girls, to study Stem subjects and working to eliminate the gender pay gap.”