Girlhood Studies

The premier at the Cannes Film Festival in January 2025, of the film Young Mothers drew, according to the reviews, a ten-minute standing ovation. It was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay along with the prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes, well known for their films depicting social realism, Young Mothers takes us into a group home in Belgium where we follow, up close, the lives of four young mothers. The film, released for public distribution in May 2025, is one that is likely to spark critical discussions in many different discourse communities for its coverage of such a critical area of social policy and, simultaneously, its treatment of stories of the personal in the lives of girls and young women. The timing of this this Special Issue of Girlhood Studies, guest edited by Doris Kakuru and Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, is particularly appropriate given the release of Young Mothers.

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies emerges from an urgent and critical need to reframe the dominant narratives surrounding adolescent girls’ pregnancy and parenting and to center their lived realities. Too often, these girls are marginalized in research and policy and framed in relation to deficit-based perspectives that neither address adequately the systemic inequities that shape their lives nor recognize their capabilities and agency. This Special Issue foregrounds perspectives that acknowledge young mothers not merely as subjects of intervention, but as knowledge holders and change agents.

In Uganda, COVID-19 fueled a surge in teenage pregnancies and motherhood, a phenomenon widely described as the shadow pandemic. Prolonged school closures (2020 to 2021) intensified gender-based adultification—the premature burdening of girls with adult responsibilities. Deep-seated cultural perceptions of adolescent girls as mature women heightened their risk of exploitation, early pregnancy, and forced motherhood. Drawing on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that engaged adolescent mothers to understand the support they need to rebuild their lives after the pandemic, we examine how adultification shaped their pathways to pregnancy and motherhood, consequently reinforcing cycles of gendered oppression and systemic neglect. By centering Ugandan girls’ experiences, we expand on the adultification discourse, stressing the need for institutional reforms and community support to protect their childhood.

In this article, I explore how pregnant and parenting Maasai schoolgirls in rural Kenya inhabit emotions like regret, anger, and hope, and how these feelings act as social forces that shape perception, relationships, and action. Centering the narrative of a schoolgirl named Namelok, I examine schoolgirlhood as an affective orientation lived within and against Girls in Development discourse that links empowerment to delayed fertility and school completion. Namelok's story illustrates how Maasai girls navigate cultural expectations, structural inequality, and intimate relations from their position as daughters. Drawing on cultural theories of emotion, I offer a relational account of agency grounded in gendered and generational social worlds and argue for placing affect at the center of scholarship on adolescent pregnancy, schoolgirl motherhood, and African girlhood.

There are knowledge gaps regarding the wellbeing of adolescent parents in humanitarian settings, particularly in relation to HIV vulnerabilities. We estimated associations between parenthood and sexual and mental health outcomes using baseline study data among refugee youth aged 16 to 24 in Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda. We conducted unadjusted and adjusted logistic and linear regression analyses to examine associations between parenthood and sexual health, mental health, and protective factors. A third of the participants were pregnant and/or had at least one child. Mental health (depression, suicidal ideation, stigma) was lower among pregnant/parenting young mothers (vs. non-pregnant/parenting women). Condom use was significantly lower among pregnant/parenting youth. Tailored interventions are required to address these social and health disparities, particularly for refugee young mothers in humanitarian settings.

I analyze, in terms of contemporaneous notions of politeness, the expressions of guilt and the excuses for being pregnant in petitions signed by girls and young women that were addressed to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, the first home in London for babies whose mothers could not look after them. My findings indicate that over half the petitions from these servants include excuses, but less than a fifth contain confessions of guilt, while a few combine both. This suggests that admitting guilt was harder than providing excuses probably because this threatened their reputation, but both may have been a guarantee of achieving their goals despite being contrary to what counted as politeness.

Previous research has examined sexual violence among pregnant girls primarily from the perspective of adults or by using quantitative data. In this article, we refer to survivors’ narratives to illustrate how systemic structures and cultural frameworks perpetuate sexual violence that condemns girls to suffer in silence. The data was collected using photo voice and the life history interviews with young pregnant women and girls. Our findings show that weak child protection structures and, at the intersection of male dominance, adultism, and economic precarity, cultural norms that prioritize family honour over reproductive justice perpetuate sexual violence against girls.

Teenage motherhood in Tanzania remains a critical socio-economic and public health challenge, exacerbated by gender inequality, limited education, and systemic barriers. In this study, applying a feminist intersectional lens and ecological systems framework, we explored the experiences, choices, and childcare struggles of teenage mothers (13 to18 years of age) in Kilimanjaro, Mwanza, Morogoro, and Shinyanga. Through 12 Focus Group Discussions and 115 interviews with stakeholders, including young mothers, our findings highlighted educational exclusion, employment barriers, social stigma, and inadequate childcare. However, despite hardships, young mothers adapted through peer support and informal work. We call for gender-responsive policies to promote education reintegration, economic opportunities, and accessible childcare to address these structural inequities and improve outcomes for teenage mothers.

In this article, I examine how young mothers navigate urban precarity and the interconnected vulnerabilities imbued in the poor urban space. I used collaborative ethnography and worked with young mothers as youth peer researchers to co-create knowledge. Data revealed that young mothers in poor urban locales experience multifaceted vulnerabilities which constrain and limit their choices. They navigate them through an agentic practice called hustling. While I have discussed hustling as a form of agency, I caution against the risk of burdened agency that might ensue and argue, rather, that agency should be understood as a process.

Despite the existing international policy frameworks that protect the rights and well-being of young mothers and pregnant girls, they continue to be stigmatized and face several barriers every day. However, they exercise agency. In this article, I discuss, from a critical feminist perspective, a photovoice exhibition by young mothers in Nairobi who were working to recover their agency, and I discuss their interview transcripts. Contextualizing it is key to acknowledging agency among these girls and young women, especially those in non-western contexts like sub-Saharan African countries. The findings from this study reveal that pregnant adolescents and young mothers live and express their agency in ways that are determined by their physical and social environments.

Uganda was hosting 1,741,331 refugees and asylum seekers as of April 2025, with youth (15 to 24) comprising 25 percent and those under 18 years accounting for 55 percent according to local sources. Refugee youth have remained vulnerable to negative health outcomes because of limited service provision, and the effects of gender norms and contextual challenges. Adolescents and young women who become mothers face challenges including social stigma, psychological stress, and mental ill-health, and especially the unmarried young mothers who single-handedly struggle to balance their responsibilities. The contextual social norms, values, and practices shape the perceptions and experiences of young refugee mothers and affect their choices and decisions although they do use their agency to navigate the various structural challenges in refugee settings.