Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I feel honoured for having been invited to speak at this plenary and I would like to thank the World Association for Sexual Health for this.
Before I begin, I want to introduce you to Sadaf. She’s a 24 year old young woman who has been volunteering for the IPPF Member Association in Pakistan since she was 19. Earlier this year, she was at the UN Commission on Population and Development and spoke on child marriage at a side event. She’s a confident young woman activist, who does not fear speaking about sex and sexuality on TV in Pakistan. Probe a little and you realise that it isn’t easy. She says, “Sex is a negative word in my family, even with cousins and peers, despite the fact that it’s a part of all our lives. My teens were miserable – I hated myself and my body.” And this is symptomatic of the culture of protection, where autonomy is neither valued nor encouraged.
IPPF has long supported the sexual rights of young people, who for us are 10-24 year olds. In 1996, young IPPF volunteers developed a poster on their sexual rights, while in 1998 they wrote the Youth Manifesto, which laid down the mandate for IPPF’s ensuing work and strategy on adolescents and young people. The Declaration on Sexual Rights, in 2008, provided a new impetus to the programmes and policies of the Federation and its Member Associations.
What do sexual rights mean to young people around the world in different situations and cultures? I bring you some voices of young people from South Asia. I have another story of a young man from Agra, the city where the Taj Mahal is located – the famous monument to love or to maternal mortality, depending on your point of view. Let’s call this young man Ravi. Ravi is newly married and has recently attended peer education sessions by the IPPF Member Association in India. He has a question – why does his new wife become ill every time they have sex? He’s eager to have sex now that he is married but can’t have as much as he would like to.
Young people’s realities are marked with a distinct lack of basic information. The peer educator begins to tell Ravi all about the mechanics of sex, pleasure, lubrication and consent. He also talks about mutual respect and communication between the partners – talking to each other about sex, their bodies and what gives them pleasure. Ravi’s experience with his wife is an example of the situations that young people find themselves in, all across South Asia. A 2009 WHO study among married young people in Nepal, aged 15-24, quotes a 22 year old woman. She says, “I got married at the age of 14 years. I did not know anything about sex before my marriage. So when I had sex for the first time, my husband convinced me to have sex even though I did not want to. But he did it (sex) forcibly and I bled and screamed and cried but he did not stop.”
As it happens, both Ravi and the peer educator were married and it was, therefore, acceptable for them to discuss the details of sex. On the other hand, there are several unmarried young people in the community who are just as interested in this information but are not yet ‘entitled’ to it. So it’s not just that girls and young women don’t have enough information or agency over their own sexual lives, but boys and young men are also forced into ignorance while, at the same time, facing pressures around sexual performance.
In Bangladesh, IPPF in partnership with its Dutch Member Association, trained a group of 17 to 21 year olds as researchers and conducted a study among 12 to 19 year olds on sexuality and sexual and reproductive health. The young researchers observed that while young boys' curiosity mainly surrounded women’s bodies and sexual intercourse, the girls' curiosity ranged from virginity to sexually transmitted infections. The most frequently mentioned curiosity among girls was about virginity. They had constant worries and various misconceptions about the issue of virginity, and thus were insecure about it. One girl said, “My body is the property of someone else (meaning her husband-to-be) and I’m taking care of it on his behalf. If I give it to someone else, it means I’m betraying my husband to be.” Other girls asked for ways that they could increase their ‘sexual power’ to please men sexually and ensure that their husbands-to-be did not engage in extramarital sex.
The impact of gender inequality and inequity on sexual health, sexual experience and sexual satisfaction, not to mention access to sexual health care and ability to make choices, is significant. According to a 2003 study, called Growing up Global, boys are more likely to report satisfaction or pleasure after their first premarital experience, while girls whose first sexual experience is premarital are more likely to experience shame, guilt or pain.
Sexual and reproductive health programmes in many countries are targeted towards people who are married or over 18 years of age, belying the reality of young people’s sexual lives. Studies show that while young people are marrying later than the previous generation, the age of first sex hasn’t changed very much. Laws that require parental or spousal consent for people younger than 18 years of age, to access health services and contraception, are critical barriers to access. An example of mismatched laws is that from India where the age of sexual consent for girls is 16, but parental or guardian’s consent is needed to access safe abortion services by a girl under the age of 18. Such a situation presents dilemmas for health service providers and very often, young people are turned away from the clinic.
IPPF’s Sexual Rights Declaration has seven guiding principles, one of which is that the rights and protections guaranteed to people under age eighteen differ from those of adults, and must take into account the evolving capacities of the individual child to exercise rights on his or her own behalf. When public health or other sexual health services and government laws and policies do not take the evolving capacities of young people into account, there are sexual rights violations. And I need not remind you of the consequences of these violations, which were also highlighted by Dr. Gill Greer, during her plenary address on Monday morning. They include unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, sexual and other violence, among others.
Apart from the lack of access to services, information and education are also denied. The young researchers in Bangladesh found that very little was covered in the school curriculum on sexuality issues. High school text books discuss all the methods of transmission for HIV, except sexual intercourse. In fact, in the text books for senior students, they added that HIV could also spread through unethical and unsafe physical relations. There was no mention of ‘sexual relations,’ neither was there an explanation of the word ‘unethical’ or about the possibility of HIV transmission within a marital context.
The widespread denial of young people’s sexuality makes sexual rights for adolescents and young people different and more complex than those of adults. South Asian society is based on the collective rather than the individual, thereby making individual desires like love and choice, unacceptable at worst and incomprehensible at best. This would explain the reactions of young people to notions of romantic love and sexual desire. A boy from Bangladesh said, “Romantic love is a sacred secret and sex is a dirty thing. So one should not have sex with his girlfriend. If they really have the urge to have sex, they can go to other girls but should keep the girlfriend a virgin.”
So when the IPPF Declaration talks about the 10 sexual rights, among which are the right to life, liberty and to be free from harm, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to education and information, the right to choose whether or not to marry or have children – what does it mean in practice for a young person in South Asia? One of the fundamental challenges of working from a rights-based perspective is finding the balance between young people’s right to be protected and their right to participate and take responsibility for exercising their own rights.
In practice, we have seen young people’s right to equality, participation and freedom from harm being upheld through the youth centres of the Family Planning Association of Bangladesh. These youth centres, known as Tarar Melas or the meeting of stars, are safe spaces where, for the first time, girls and boys can meet and openly discuss sexuality. They increase access of young people to youth counsellors on sexual and reproductive health. They enable peer educators to discuss gender, rights and sexuality with other young people and help reduce the stigma associated with unmarried young people accessing sexual and reproductive health services.
Young people’s right to know and learn and to have their rights upheld has seen a successful advocacy campaign, executed by the Family Planning Association of Nepal and its youth volunteers, for teachers to be trained on providing comprehensive sexuality education.
The right to choose whether or not to marry and the right to be recognised as an individual before the law has been upheld by the Family Planning Association of Pakistan, through its community mobilisation against child marriage and the use of girls as compensation, while providing youth friendly services to survivors.
The right of young people to think and express themselves freely has been upheld by the strengthening of national level youth networks among IPPF’s Member Associations in South Asia, which are linked to IPPF’s South Asia Regional Youth Network. This is a forum that affords young people a democratic and equal voice in IPPF’s governing body as well as building their capacity to share power with adults and understand sex, sexuality, sexual and reproductive health and rights.
One of the results of enabling young people to express themselves and training them with research skills has been the development of Youth Shadow Reports on MDG 5B. Young people in Bangladesh and Nepal conducted primary research on the indicators for this Millennium Development Goal, which is about Universal Access to Reproductive Health and they documented the realities of young people for policy makers. Here, I might add that though there is a lot of research on young people being presented at this Congress, we have not necessarily heard from young people themselves and I would encourage the organising committees to promote youth-adult partnership and participation of young people in future Congresses.
Part of IPPF’s work with adolescents and young people is to ensure that they fully understand the implications of sexual rights in their own lives. It is quite important for young people to really know about their sexual rights in order to advocate for and demand them and to have agency. The most recent publication from IPPF – Exclaim! – does just that. It is a guide for young people to sexual rights and provides practical application of sexual rights for young people to programme and service providers.
In South Asian culture, parents and elders in the community are responsible for making decisions and choices for adolescents and young people. Obedience and respect for adults is a virtue, lack of adherence to which, can result in incarceration or loss of life as seen when young people attempt to make sexuality choices for themselves. These choices could be around marriage, engagement in sexual activity, expression of sexual orientation, choice of sexual partner or even discussion on sex. However, consistent efforts in upholding sexual rights, educating communities on the fact that young people are sexual beings, advocating for governments to recognise the evolving capacities of young people, providing confidential and non-judgemental information and services to young people and ensuring meaningful participation of young people are needed to achieve change.
In the words of 17 year old, youth researcher and activist, Mahfuza from Bangladesh, “In my community, they say I’m young – why am I talking about these issues. We have no right to make any decisions – elders are supposed to make decisions for you. But recently, there was a fair in my town called, ‘Everybody has the right to information and education,’ which is also a sexual right. So I believe we are progressing.”
Key documents:
Exclaim! Young people's guide to Sexual Rights (2011)
Girls Decide: Choices on Sex and Pregnancy (2011)
Sexual Rights: An IPPF Declaration (2008)
Voice! IPPF/Youth Manifesto (2000)
Arushi Singh
Programme Office – Adolescents & Young People
IPPF South Asia Regional Office