“I wanted to know whether and how trauma as a possibility, not an actuality, could shape girls’ being in the world in potentially damaging ways,” says Rajiva. “Most work examines trauma and sexual violence after the fact. I wanted to know what happens in the lead-up to something that, according to the stats, happens to many women before the age of 25.”
Her book Girlhoods in the Traumascape: Sexual Violence in the Everyday Lives of Young Indigenous and White Women has been published by the University of British Columbia Press. It draws on focus groups with girls aged 13 to 19 to examine how they understand safety, fear, responsibility and resistance in the everyday spaces that shape their lives.
Learning to stay on guard
Rajiva uses the term “traumascape” to describe the interconnected structures, including family, schools, peer groups, media, public spaces and the legal system, that teach girls to manage the possibility of sexual violence long before anything happens to them.
These messages often sound protective. However, Rajiva argues they can also teach girls that danger is everywhere and that preventing violence is their responsibility.
“But girls and young women do all this, and they still get sexually harassed, assaulted and raped,” she says. “They’re then told it must’ve somehow been their fault.”
She adds that, as one participant put it, parents don’t teach “their boys not to be creepy.”
For Rajiva, the traumascape helps explain how ordinary warnings, rules and expectations impact the way girls move through the world.
Listening as prevention
Listening to girls was central to Rajiva’s research. Too often, she says, adults write about or speak for girls, but the girls’ own interpretations of their lives are missing.
“If we don’t know how girls feel about their lives, or the strategies they use to navigate difficult or dangerous situations, how can we come up with better education or policy initiatives to help them?” she says.
“If we don’t know how girls feel about their lives, or the strategies they use to navigate difficult or dangerous situations, how can we come up with better education or policy initiatives to help them?”
Mythili Rajiva
— Professor in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences
“The participants in the focus groups were so smart and so analytical. They knew what was going on, even when adults didn’t get it or pretended they didn’t get it.”
For Rajiva, this is one of the clearest lessons of the research: girls are already analyzing the risks and contradictions around them, so prevention must begin by taking their knowledge seriously.
Different experiences of safety
This focus on lived experience also shows why prevention can’t treat girlhood as a single, universal experience.
Mainstream ideas of girlhood, argues Rajiva, often centre a white, Western, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual and non-disabled experience. Indigenous girls are frequently excluded from this idealized image of innocence or represented through harmful stereotypes.
“When researchers talk about girls’ experiences, they often mean white girls,” she says. “Indigenous girls are barely studied, and when they are, they’re siloed off as a ‘special topic.’”
Rajiva compares Indigenous girls’ and white girls’ experiences in Canada to show how race, settler colonialism and social privilege shape safety. For example, some white girls described parental surveillance as frustrating or unfair. But Indigenous girls were more likely to describe staying in touch with parents as comforting or protective.
For Indigenous girls, fear of sexual violence is also informed by ongoing colonial violence, racism and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people. Not only had some participants heard about that crisis, but they knew or were related to people who had gone missing.
“For them, this was not just a fear but a reality,” says Rajiva.
She also found that Indigenous girls often connected sexual violence to settler violence and community survival, while white girls more often described feeling alone or individually responsible for their safety. This comparison is why the book uses “girlhoods” in the plural: there’s no single way of being a girl. Prevention efforts must recognize how different histories and social positions shape what safety means.
Support without blame
Schools, families, peer culture, media and public spaces all affect how girls learn about vulnerability and responsibility. Dress codes can police girls’ bodies while doing little to challenge boys’ behaviour. Institutions can also leave girls and women to do their own “safety work.”
“This is a whole world of moving pieces that close down girls’ choices, freedoms and ability to be something other than vulnerable bodies,” says Rajiva.
Her findings point to an urgent need to rethink prevention. Supporting girls doesn’t mean ignoring risk. It means refusing to place the burden of preventing violence on girls themselves.
“Talk to girls about these issues openly and directly, rather than just hoping that nothing bad ever happens,” says Rajiva. “And then, while being pragmatic about safety, don’t further punish girls through policing their bodies, clothes, behaviour or activities.”
She also emphasizes the importance of socializing boys differently, including through regular conversations about consent, respect and masculinity. For educators, parents, community organizations and policymakers, prevention must address the structures that make some bodies vulnerable in the first place.
Although Girlhoods in the Traumascape examines trauma and sexual violence, Rajiva also points toward change: refusing the idea that sexual violence is inevitable, or that girls must simply learn to live with fear.
“Things can change,” she says. “Things do change, but it requires a lot of work and different kinds of work from different people.”
“This world isn’t what we want it to be, so find even small ways to make it better.”
Rajiva’s research leaves readers with a practical challenge: to build prevention efforts around the realities young people describe rather than the burdens they’re often asked to carry alone.