The world often tells girls and young women to be more confident, to “own” their bodies, or to ignore negative comments. While these are convenient shorthand suggestions, what they actually need is more complex. As the our report “Body Liberation for Gender Equality in Europe” shows, improving confidence alone does not solve the real problem: body shame, body policing, and exclusion are created by social norms and repeated in everyday spaces like schools, families, and youth settings. So how do we provide the most appropriate support to young women in youth work? Besides building resilience, it is crucial to provide practical tools and go a step further by challenging the conditions that make young women feel judged or excluded in the first place.

Why building confidence alone is unsustainable

In youth work, building confidence, resilience, and self-awareness are crucial parts of female empowerment. It is an important approach that helps women find courage and inspiration to stand up for themselves. But the argument we wish to emphasize is that this alone will not solve existing inequalities, and it may continue to place the burden on those who are already oppressed.

Confidence can help someone speak up, but it cannot remove the pressure that made them feel small in the first place. Under systemic pressure, this is incredibly tiring to deal with every day. It is also unfair to place the burden of tackling these systems on young women while they already have so much on their plates.

Similarly, for those experiencing explicit abuse, it is important to equip them with tools to help overcome the harm and stand up against it in the future, but systemic issues require systemic solutions that come through collective work to change values and practices.

How body liberation principles can help in this

One of the principles of body liberation shifts the focus from “How do I feel about my body?” to “Why are some bodies judged more than others?” That is a much more useful question for youth work, because it moves us from individual blame toward a wider view of gender equality, dignity, and participation. To make real progress on gender-based body ideals, it is not enough to train women in confidence alone; we also need to train the people in their lives and think about how collective strength can support them in these situations.

The GENDEQ report found that young women wanted not only practical tools and scenarios for standing up for themselves, but also safer spaces and support that takes body-related harm seriously, not just encouragement to feel better. This is one of the central ideas of body liberation, which is rooted in activism and a community mindset.

What youth work in Europe can do about this

More and more research, as well as practitioners, point in the same direction: working on systemic solutions is the way forward. While empowering young women through training in transversal skills is an important part of youth work, it is crucial to keep asking how we can address unfair systems and reduce the burden on young women.

Here are a few questions anybody working with youth might ask when thinking about solutions in their own context:

• How can we help families, educators, employers, and medical staff notice body image struggles and the negative consequences earlier?
• How can we create physical spaces where young women can feel relief from daily body pressure and weight stigma?
• How can we build supportive communities that help young women feel they belong and offer the peer support they may be missing?
• How can we use values and language that are inclusive and do not stigmatize any body type or ability?

There is no single magic formula that will quickly erase all gender-based stereotypes and body image pressures. But if we want our work and support to be more sustainable, we need to think about how we, as individuals, organizations, and movements, can do more than offer immediate support. We need to build stronger support systems that cultivate wellbeing and feeling safe also outside of youth work.