Rites for Girls

What was missing in your education?

“I learned about tectonic plate movements, but not about how to manage my big feelings. I learned how to multiply fractions, but not how to find my voice.”

What if you’d had the experience of belonging to a group of girls where you didn’t have to change anything about yourself to fit in, because you were accepted exactly as you were? What difference would that have made to your life? At Rites for Girls, that’s what we offer young women.

Girls’ Net provides guidance and camaraderie through times of challenge to small groups of same-age girls (aged eight to eighteen) in weekly online sessions over six weeks. Our mentors offer tools for coping well and the girls access their inner resources whilst also realising that they’re not alone (and can support each other).

Girls Journeying Together groups offer a year of in-person monthly support for pre-teen girls as they practise being true to themselves, learn about puberty, share their hopes and fears, make the transition from primary to secondary school and help each other into their teens.

We support girls to emerge from adolescence stronger than they went in, working to prevent the high rates of anxiety, selfharm and low esteem.

We train women to facilitate Girls Journeying Together and Girls’ Net groups, supporting the girls and their mothers. Facilitators become ‘the woman they needed at eleven’ and are provided with meaningful work that fits around other commitments, enabling them to serve in a diverse range of cultures and bring back the power of community in a way that appeals to today’s girls.

From Daughter to Woman: Parenting girls safely through their teens by our founder, Kim McCabe, is a practical book for parents of girls aged eight to eighteen, bringing back the joy of parenting a preteen into and through her teens.

The Rites for Girls CIC mission is to change the world one girl at a time, by making the lives of young women safer, kinder and better supported. Join us!

Barbie dolls

The original influencer

On March 9th 1959, Mattel launched the first Barbie doll in New York City. Today, Barbie remains one of the most iconic and popular toys in contemporary culture.

Inspiration for the original doll came from mother and entrepreneur Ruth Handler. Ruth believed the creation of the Barbie could work as a source of inspiration for young girls who wanted to achieve goals beyond the categories of mother, wife or caregiver, represented by the majority of female-targeted toys at the time.

However, Barbie diverged off this path of redefining womanhood and became synonymous with a vacuous form of unrealistic and unattainable beauty: turning the female form into one of objectification.

Early attempts to increase representation in the Barbie, such as Christie, a Black doll released in 1968, have been largely superseded by imagery of a doll who is white, slim, blonde-haired and blue-eyed. The doll, typically for children between the ages of 9 and 12, very quickly obtained a stronghold on children’s cultural imagination around female beauty standards. Parents have consistently expressed outrage and fear over the power of the doll on young girls, with several studies showing the doll’s negative impact on selfesteem.

Mattel has since taken steps to increase the diversity and inclusivity of its dolls. In 2015, Barbie introduced three new body types: curvy, tall and petite, and in 2019, dolls reflecting permanent physical disabilities have been added—including a doll with a wheelchair and prosthetic leg. As of today, there are over 35 skin tones, over 94 hairstyles and 9 body types.

Beyond Barbie herself, Mattel continues to take an active stance against racism, using its global status to educate children about racial injustice and discrimination. Not only does the company ensure that one in five dolls developed by the brand are Black, but have also developed the Barbie Vlogger platform to speak openly about racism.

Tate: What is the way

The arrest of Andrew Tate, social media’s most prominent misogynist influencer, has reignited gender debates. Detained in Romania late last year, Andrew Tate’s high-profile case and output have given us real cause to question how far lessons have been learnt after incidents of shocking violence towards women, past and present. Rightly, it is the influence that Tate and other similar figures hold over some young men that concerns us most, and which leaves us trying to understand why many still engage with this insidious content despite the best efforts of schools and other organisations across the country.

Challenging Unhealthy Behaviour

Influencers like Tate are poster boys for disenfranchised men who feel under attack and are an expression of masculinity in crisis. The backlash they represent illustrates how overdue and necessary it has been to reassess outdated modes of masculinity. Why is challenging unhealthy and abusive behaviour so divisive? The answer, as so many others have already argued, is because it is so embedded in society’s gendered values. Deconstructing these have left many feeling uncertain at best, and under attack at worst. So, what is the way forward from this?

Pathway for Progress

As adults, we must reflect on how we have been shaped and affected by our backgrounds and society. We may all have played an active part in perpetuating outdated and gendered ideas and been victim to them too. Reflecting on this has required a good deal of soul searching and, as one might expect at any point of real societal change, left many questioning what to think and feel. Realistically, this work will never be ‘done’ or ‘finished’; as daunting as that sounds, perhaps it gives us scope to accept we are all still learning, as much as it is a caution that we all have a lot to learn.

As parents we need to apply empathy to our children. Many young people don’t agree with or even watch videos by the likes of Tate, but if they do and if they agree with some of what he has to say, how should we react? I think we can find the answer in the positive comments to those videos. These young people feel ‘lost’, that for them Tate is ‘the hero we all NEEDED’ [sic]. Influencers have become voices in the wilderness of adolescence, guiding through the dimly contemplated paths of what it means to be a ‘grown-up’. An influencer’s brand relies on them picking a message and sticking to it; in this case, it has resulted in a toxic but powerfully persuasive simplification of the way forward for young men coming into adulthood.

The Values We Live

What does ‘being an adult’ mean after all? I feel that for young people this is not just a crisis of value, but a crisis of understanding value. These influencers speak most strongly to those who feel cast aside by society in part for not living up to an ideal perpetuated through media platforms. A significant part of Tate’s allure is the glamour of his online image. This belies the fact that, while he may have a lot of money and

TURN BACK TO PAGE 57 to read about Rites for Girls some backswanky cars, citing his personal philosophy as the root of his ‘success’, he lived in an industrial estate and his hubris was brought down by a poorlyjudged pizza delivery. Rather than signifying our social worth through material things, we need to show these young men that the values we live by are a stronger indicator of a ‘successful’ life than the ‘value’ we have.

Educating Ourselves

Finally, as teachers we must continue to strive to become better educated about misogynist subculture. This means being aware of the lexicon of incel culture and how misogynists have adopted the language of the Wachowski sisters’ 1999 film The Matrix to communicate their ideology. What might seem like an innocent cultural reference in the midst of a maths lesson could have a darker significance, giving an early indication of a child’s steps towards radicalisation. Or, less obscurely, how familiar are we with the opus of these influencers? Do we have the knowledge and resources to facilitate both the punitive and restorative work which will help bring about cultural change? My guess is that not all of us do.

Ultimately, we are trying to affect cultural change. It isn’t happening overnight and it won’t. The way forward is going to require patience and acceptance that there will be setbacks and new challenges to overcome. But we will work continuously and collaboratively in the hope we can eventually overcome it.

WILL HOWELL-HARTE Head of PSHE at Alleyn’s School www.alleyns.org.uk