In my hometown, Chandigarh, the State AIDS Control Society and the Tourism Department have established a Condom Bar, which is essentially a Bar that uses condoms as part of the decoration and has them freely available at the counter.
Now this bar has received some flak and been labelled ‘ineffective for tackling AIDS’ because it promotes a “western” lifestyle. I wonder, what is it that constitutes a South Asian lifestyle?
Does it mean obeying your parents and getting married to the man they choose for you before you turn 18, foregoing an education? Because an average of 50% girls in South Asia do get married off before 18.
Or maybe a South Asian lifestyle involves agreeing to undergo an abortion because your family doesn’t like the fact that you’re carrying a girl child.
Could a South Asian lifestyle involve being sexually abused by a person known to you, as 50% children are in India?
I’ve been asked to talk about meeting the needs and aspirations of young people as well as addressing the importance of male involvement. With 1.2 billion of us being between the ages of 15 and 24, and the world’s nations having arrived at the midpoint for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, it is imperative that we take stock of where national priorities lie.
In a globalised world, young people face many pressures regarding sex and sexuality.
A truth, rarely mentioned, is that a lot of us have sex for pleasure and can never really celebrate it because of the conflicting messages and norms where, on the one hand, sex is seen as negative and associated with guilt, fear and disease, while on the other, there are positive sexualised images available from, say, television programmes that tell stories about sex for pleasure, lust and love.
There are also pressures on young people to conform to, sometimes contradictory, expectations of masculinity and femininity, like, the more sexual partners you have, the more macho you are. Or, the less you know about sex, the purer woman you are.
Such pressures are then perpetuated by a lack of information, skills and awareness on rights, a lack of voice and a limited and constricted view of young people’s reality and sexuality.
This limited view is exemplified time and again when not just policy makers, but also programme implementers and development workers like you and me, pass moral judgements on an idea, without any evidence. When we base our programmes for young people, on what is ‘acceptable’ under the cultural norms, without looking at what the facts are telling us, or taking people’s rights into account.
What young people want is not often what we give in our information and services – there is a mismatch because, lets face it – we’re not too happy to work closely with young people and ask them what it is that they really want. Why?
Because fundamentally, we still think that they should not be sexually active! I’m often asked by people when they hear that I work on sexual and reproductive health and rights – what is the right age to begin having sex?
People think there’s some kind of 'ideal age' for sexual initiation – the fact is that there is none. The ideal age is when YOU decide.
Different people have different ways and criteria for coming to that decision – it could be love, lust, even money. It isn’t our place to decide on an arbitrary age but to support young people to make healthy and happy decisions.
IPPF has been working with young people for a number of years, and we have learned some valuable lessons along the way.
In 2005, IPPF decided to do a rapid assessment on sexual decision-making among young people in Ghana and Kenya. This study was designed and conducted entirely by young people after they were oriented on research methodologies.
Some of the findings were significantly different from previous such studies, because with a young person asking the relevant questions, it was easier for other young people to open up. For example, a significantly higher number of young people, in this survey, admitted to being sexually active at younger ages, as compared to the findings from the Demographic and Health Survey in that country.
When I go into a training session with young people on sex and sexuality, risks and vulnerabilities, I get all the correct answers about what a condom is useful for, how to avoid STIs and HIV or unwanted pregnancies – but there are always these underlying questions like, “How do I say YES!”
Young people ask about pleasure – they don’t want to know why a condom is important, they want to know how to use it in sex and yet not reduce the pleasure.
A new UN study has found that in some parts of India, 84% of young women were aware about where to get male condoms.
Despite this, condom use is barely 3-5%, across the states, according to the 3rd National Family Health Survey. One of the most common reasons that men give for not wanting to use condoms is that they reduce pleasure.
Yes, people get uneasy when young people talk about pleasure during sex – because, we don’t think that young people should be having any sex in the first place!
But we’re again forgetting that among these young people, at least in South Asia, around 50% of the girls were married before the age of 19.
So actually society has sanctioned their sexual initiation, without equipping them with the information or skills to save their lives or improve the quality of their lives.
We forget that, for example in India, the average married man is 4.7 years older than his wife. This age gap, in addition to other gender norms, means that she cannot negotiate with her husband about sex, contraception, and childbearing, as well as other aspects of domestic life.
This young woman probably needs permission to access sexual and reproductive health services, which are quite often neither accessible nor affordable.
Parents and teachers don’t want to talk about sex and sexuality with their children. Policy makers turn a blind eye when a 15-year old girl is married off to an older, sexually experienced man, thereby sanctioning her rape, but object vociferously when life-saving sexuality education for 15-year olds is introduced in schools.
National Conventions against Sex Education are held in this country, again under the dubious banner of “degenerate western culture”.
Universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including HIV-related services, for young people cannot be achieved if young people are not involved. And involvement needs to take place from the very beginning, starting from the design of the programme.
Young people’s first need is to be treated as thinking beings that have agency.
Too often, we decide against involving young people because they don’t have enough experience or skills. These notions are not evidence-based.
Young people, volunteering with IPPF, have done good work, reached out to communities and made lasting impact. Moreover, if we believe that young people need to learn and grow, we need to give them the opportunity to become critical thinkers and active citizens.
One example of this is IPPF’s Member Association in Sri Lanka, which has had a Youth Committee since the ‘70’s.
This committee consists of young volunteers of FPA Sri Lanka, who are allocated a budget every year. They design their own programmes to reach out to other young people with sexual and reproductive health information and services, based on their perceptions of what is needed.
The committee elects its own chairpersons and runs itself quite efficiently, with minimum support from FPA Sri Lanka. This youth committee is also responsible for ensuring that young people’s needs are addressed at every level of FPA Sri Lanka’s work.
These are the kinds of programmes that need to take priority for funding to ensure access to sexual and reproductive health services.
Quite often, we tend to concentrate on young women and girls, overlooking the fact that young men and boys are also equal partners and sexual beings in and of themselves. Men’s (expected) behaviour puts them at risk.
A “masculine” male is expected to have multiple sexual partners and is less likely to seek health care than women. Men’s behaviour also puts women at risk – studies among males who have sex with males in Mumbai have revealed that 22% were married or had sex with females also.
IPPF’s Member Association in India worked on a project that reached out to males who have sex with males, or MSM, to provide them with sexual and reproductive health services, including information on HIV.
Rather than have a separate facility that singled out MSM, they decided to integrate a male sexual health clinic into their regular services of contraception, abortion and antenatal care.
The young men who now frequent the clinic and have claimed it as their space say that the reason they like to use FPA India’s services is because they are treated with respect here. Some of these clients have also expressed their happiness in the fact that they can now get services under the same roof as their wives.
The need for a greater focus on sexual and reproductive health services, especially for young people, cannot be overstated. Worldwide, about 14 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19 — both married and unmarried — give birth each year. Pregnancy is a leading cause of death for young women aged 15 to 19 worldwide, with complications of childbirth and unsafe abortion being the major contributing factors.
World leaders and governments that made pledges towards sexual and reproductive health and rights in 1994 have failed in their promises for the young people of the developing world. And therefore, the efforts at reaching out to young people with sexual and reproductive health services are half-baked. And these half-baked efforts are further bound by restrictive and fatal policies like the Global Gag Rule and abstinence-only education!
It is time to deliver for young people.
It is time that we claim our rights and demand nation states to respect, protect and fulfil them.
Young people are voicing their needs and aspirations louder and louder – are we brave enough to listen?