Creating Safe Spaces and Building Social Assets for Young Women in the Developing World: A New Role for Sports

Abstract

We are witnessing the convergence of two important trends; the international women's health and rights community's appreciation of sports as a legitimate field of action and inquiry, and the interests of women's sports advocates to reach beyond their traditional scope to incorporate broader health and development objectives into their agenda. This convergence provides an opportune moment to reflect on the role sports play-or could be made to play-in creating safe spaces and building social assets for young women in the developing world. At the same time, it is important to disentangle the bundle of both substantiated and purported benefits of sports and to acknowledge their differential relevance and impact on girls' lives in diverse cultural and economic settings. Although there are many similarities, important differences between the developed and the developing world exist; thus a more nuanced analysis of the role of sports in young women's lives is needed. To date, much of the research linking participation in sports with various health and development outcomes has been carried out in the United States and other Western countries. The scientific literature documents the physical and mental health benefits of sport, most notably the relationship between sport and physical fitness; its contribution to the reduction of chronic disease; its links to enhancing mental health by reducing symptoms of stress and depression, and its general association with building self-confidence and self-efficacy (PCPFS 1997). More recently, sport has been viewed as a tool in community regeneration, social inclusion, and reconstruction efforts in postconflict situations. This last articulation is an interesting area that warrants study and analysis of its potential, but with explicit attention to gender. It is important to note that no similar data or large-scale research studies on any of the aforementioned topics exist in the developing world, thus comparable data sets are not available. Although there is evidence in support of the many hypotheses related to sport in Western contexts, none have been empirically tested in the developing world. Moreover, as important as these benefits are for girls and women in developed countries, their meaning and relevance in the developing world are less clear. For example, in much of the developing world young women are often very physically active by virtue of the heavy work burden they carry or distances they walk, and at the same time chronic diseases are not typically considered major public health problems in many developing countries. Aside from the newly emerging obesity phenomenon that is affecting predominately middle-class urban populations as they shift toward more Western patterns of consumption and dietary habits, physical fitness in and of itself has not been a convincing argument for sport in the developing world. The use of sport as a vehicle to pass various health messages has utility in many contexts, however the extent to which this method of information diffusion is more effective in changing any particular health behavior over other types of messaging strategies has not been well-documented. Suggestions that sports bolster self-esteem, while appealing, have not been adequately studied in developing countries. Definition and measurement of self-esteem constructs have been particularly problematic. Rather than self-esteem per se, research efforts have begun to focus on defining context-specific measures of self-efficacy and agency (Brady personal communication). What is perhaps much more fundamental, and potentially more powerful, has to do with access to and use of the public space and girls' and women's visibility in the public sphere. This paper will address the question of whether sport can serve as a mechanism for building social networks and bringing girls into the public sphere, and by so doing begin to transform gender norms. I will look specifically at what we know about adolescent girls' lives in the developing world and how within that context sport might be used as a tool to reconfigure the terms of their lives. …

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