Goals For Girls

Soccer is "the global game." It is played all over the planet, in widely different cultures and nations. It's idolized as "the beautiful game" and celebrated for the way it can help people from the lower classes — the barrios, the slums, the favelas — not only to escape poverty, but to become national heroes.

Unfortunately, as global, beautiful, and egalitarian as soccer may seem, it for the most part does not include women. Or rather, the way it is played, portrayed, and celebrated does not often include women.

Most everywhere in the world, soccer is the domain of men, and female participation is viewed as the violation of a sacred oath. Female soccer players in South Africa are attacked, raped, and killed. In Iran, they're forbidden from going to men's games, and forced to dress as men to practice outside the stadium. Moroccan women's teams have to battle for a slice of the money, promotion, time and space given to men's teams. In Argentina, the pressure of traditional gender roles — forcing women to stay home and clean, and to have babies at a young age — limits girls' ability to play.

Goals For Girls hopes to remedy this. A documentary about Argentine girls living in a shantytown and playing on an all-girls soccer team, Goals For Girls shows the impact soccer can have on women's lives, and also the influences, beliefs, and pressures that frequently prevent women from playing it.

The girls featured in the documentary experience not only gender prejudice, but racial and class discrimination as well. They're attacked with the racial slurs common to much of Latin America — "blackie," "Indian," etc. — and they're eyed with suspicion because they're from Buenos Aires' slums. The various prejudices working against them narrow their options into motherhood or work as maids. Soccer, however, is a way for them not only to assert their presence in their community and to speak up to boys, but also to realize their own potential beyond the standard, limited paths drawn for them.

The Goals For Girls project is unique in that it doesn't simply seek to visit the shantytown, make a Hoops Dreams-ish flick about the girls, and move on to the next topic. The filmmakers, Gabriel Balanovsky and Ginger Gentile, are starting a video workshop that will teach girls to make their own videos, telling their stories and examining their lives through images.

I wrote about a similar project during the World Cup, an organization called Kick It Up! that taught girls how to become digital journalists and report on both soccer and on their lives. I find these organizations and projects particularly useful, because they stick with the girls they profile and find ways to help these women empower themselves and their futures. To find out more about Goals For Girls, and to offer donations and/or set up a home screening of the short version of the documentary, visit the website.

Photo credit: Vreimunde