Black Girls Navigate the Physical and Emotional Landscape of the Neighbourhood: Normalised Violence and Strategic Agency

Abstract: This article considers how young black women living in gang-affected neighbourhoods in an urban area in England, UK navigate their safety in public and private spaces, and how these spaces overlap and intersect. Drawing on a project with eighteen participants aged fourteen to nineteen, the research seeks to understand how the participants inhabit, navigate and strategize for their safety through their narratives of life and survival in an unsafe neighbourhood. Findings indicate that they experience sexual harassment in public spaces and gang-associated sexual and physical violence as common, accepted aspects of their everyday realities, from as young as twelve. The narratives suggest that participants navigate complex friendship groups to protect each other and their families through tight codes of trust, secrecy, privacy and conflict-management strategies. This article seeks to bring attention to how young women utilise their agency to illuminate the coping strategies they draw on to navigate their physical environments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for interventions.

Author(s): Claudia Bernard & Anna Carlile

Date Published: 01 May 2021

Depositing User: Basiratu Kolawole

DOI: 10.1177/1473325020920341

Keywords: Peer-on-Peer Violence, Navigating Safe Spaces, Coping Strategies & Gang-Associated Sexual Violence.

Page(s): 1-30

Place of publication: London, UK

Publication title: Qualitative Social Work

Published URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325020920341

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Subject(s): Social Work, Sociology, Youth studies, Gender studies & Race and ethnicity studies

Type of publication: Journal Article