Lessons from developing countries
Deborah L. Tolman and Sarah H. Costa
Sexual rights for adolescent girls and young women are at a precarious yet also unprecedented historical moment. While the concept of these rights has achieved a potentially powerful public status in many parts of the world, their full articulation and promotion remains fragile. Ironically, this instability is particularly pervasive in the USA, where the politicisation and commodification of young women’s sexuality has combined with the practice of keeping education, health and development in ‘separate silos’, working in a parallel rather than an integrated way. In this chapter, we would like to suggest that this silo effect is brought into relief and alternative approaches become evident in examining effective efforts that support girls’ sexual rights in developing countries.
We will begin by briefly reviewing the concept of sexual rights for girls and how they are addressed globally and in the USA. Based on a review of programmes and interventions in the developing world that seem to get it right, we will then identify a menu of components we have distilled that holds the potential to enable girls’ sexual rights. Finally, we will argue that what is needed and possible for advancing young women’s sexual rights in the USA can be more transformational than a restricted set of implementations or even curricular tweaks. Ultimately, we suggest that these efforts can and must be anchored in a more imaginative ‘out of the box’ approach that goes far beyond constrained initiatives in overburdened schools: initiating, mobilising and supporting a social movement for girls’ sexual rights, led by and with young people, enabled and supported by adults who care about them.
The Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing) Platform for Action put forward the groundbreaking concept that the right of women to control their sexuality – the basis for their sexual rights – is an indivisible part of their human rights, and that without it, women cannot fully realise their other human rights. This construction of women’s sexual rights as human rights has been reaffirmed at several subsequent international meetings (Molyneux and Razavi 2006).
Sexual rights are often conceptually connected to the right to sexual health for women and girls; sometimes the two are even equated or conflated. Importantly, sexual rights are necessary but not sufficient for sexual health (Klugman 2000) that is, women and girls must have their rights to control and define their own sexuality – not only to be free from any coerced sexual behaviour and risks to give consent or not, to express their own sexual wishes not simply do whatever their partners demand, to have pleasurable and meaningful sexual experiences – in order to pursue the taller order of sexual health. This distinction underscores the importance of making explicit and integrating what has been referred to as ‘the sexuality connection’ (Dixon-Mueller 1993: 269; Higgins and Hirsch 2007: 133) in sexual and reproductive rights and health. Sexual rights for girls and women must also be understood within a recognition that gender inequalities at both the individual and structural levels are produced and perpetuated through patriarchal social systems require a specific claim for them, i.e., a neutral (ungendered) claim for sexual pleasure as a human right does not account for the still pervasive subordination and exploitation of women in service of men’s sexual pleasure (Higgins and Hirsch 2007; Oriel 2005; Petchesky 2000b).
Following the Cairo UN Conference on Population in 1994 and the Beijing UN Conference on Women in 1995, sexual health and sexual rights gained greater currency and have since gained some recognition in the services, programmes and legal frameworks in many parts of the developing world (Petchesky 2000a). Most recently, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has put forward a Declaration of Sexual Rights (IPPF 2008). However, even in countries that do embrace the significance of women’s and girls’ sexual rights, in practice, few countries’ laws or policies or everyday cultural practices provide women and especially girls with effective protection from coercion, discrimination and violence or with ‘enabling conditions’ (Corrêa and Petchesky 1994: 120) for developing and acting on a sense of entitlement and empowerment, one of the key psychological and material roots of sexual rights. Fundamentalist states and movements all over the world consistently target women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. Since 2001 this challenge has been compounded by US policies that compromise women’s and girls’ (and all young people’s) sexual rights, both within and outside the USA.
In the USA, the development of effective tools for action within legal, education and health arenas has seriously lagged behind progress made in many developing countries, despite what would appear to be insurmountable political and structural challenges in these contexts. Hampered by the conservative and religious forces that have suppressed, resisted and punished dialogue and efforts and even public discourse, the USA is far behind even in acknowledging sexual rights as fundamental for women and girls. Rather, the USA has taken the lead in a newly potent commodification of sex that perverts the notion of girls’ and women’s sexual rights even before we begin to act on them as conceived on the international stage. At this conjuncture, we have the opportunity to draft a rough map, to act as surveyors for how the USA can and must infuse sexual rights into the current rights discourses for women and especially for adolescent girls.
In recent years in the USA, sexual rights understood as human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) youth has become part of the larger discourse about human rights, and in a growing number of cases, put into practices due in part to federal mandates for safety in schools (National Safe Schools Partnership 2007). This interpretation of sexual rights has been fundamentally and almost exclusively liberal, that is, compelling access, freedom from harm, discrimination and violence for the expression of diverse sexual orientations. Many important cases have pushed forward this vital agenda for securing equal status for a population that has been victimised and marginalised through discrimination, intolerance, coercion and violence.
For young people themselves, this progress has been instigated and sustained in schools by the work of organisations like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which strives to assure all members of the school community are valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression (www.glsen.org). Sexual citizenship, a rights-based status, has been construed largely in terms of the freedoms denied and now due young people with alternative sexualities and genders and their expressions (Fields and Hirschman 2007). While this sexual rights discourse has yielded legal protections for LGBTQ people and diminished intolerance, this conceptualisation of sexual rights has to this point been predicated primarily on sexual orientation (Klugman 2000; see www.hrc.org).
What has remained unsaid in the USA is that there is a palpable need for a public discourse of sexual rights for all women and girls, acknowledging the variability of political, economic, race and class barriers for different populations and communities, as well as the stubbornly entrenched cultural ideologies that serve as barriers to, and sometimes obfuscators of, these rights. As the recent advances in this realisation of rights for the LGBTQ community demonstrate, now is a unique and vital moment for action not only in legal efforts for access and resources, but for multiple efforts to front and forward sexual rights for adolescent girls in the USA. In this chapter, we look outside the legal framework towards civil society actions, programmes and practices already up and running in developing countries that can enable and instantiate these rights for girls.
The good news is that we do not have to start from scratch. Non- governmental organisations (NGOs) in developing countries have been engaged in this work for years and thus offer tremendous insights and information about what is necessary to enable and ensure girls’ sexual rights. What can a country such as the USA learn from these ongoing efforts in developing countries? To this end, we have reviewed a variety of community-, school- and service-based programmes and interventions in developing countries that are up and running which formally and informally support the realisation of girls’ and young women’s sexual rights. These programmes have demonstrated results not only in terms of girls’ empowerment, ability and motivation to know and act on their sexual rights themselves but also to press their communities for the enabling conditions required for them to do so.
It is possible to identify seven persuasive components or strategies characterising these programmes and using selected examples, we outline them later. While some of these programmes incorporate multiple interlocking elements, which we argue is critical to their success vis-à-vis sexual rights for girls, others exemplify how one of these elements contributes to effectiveness. We suggest that these seven essential elements offer routes towards building an integrated and transformational approach to young women’s sexual rights in countries such as the USA, which we begin to map in the conclusion to this chapter.
The first key element is the holistic and integrated approach of these programmes. This quality takes into account the complexities of the social contexts and basic social needs of girls and recognises the centrality of gender and sexuality to all aspects of their physical and social development. These are often broader community efforts, involving less ‘surgical’ approaches to sexuality education. They offer more than what not to do, and do more than just address problems, elaborating how sexual health and respecting sexual rights benefits young girls’ psychosocial development, confidence, sense of entitlement to health – and how these contribute to the health and progress of the society. This systemic approach allows more linking activities across different sectors and engages actors from different services and support systems.
In Nigeria, for example, the Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI) is addressing the challenges girls face in the society and equipping them with information, skills and opportunities for action to grow and realise their full potential. The initiative serves more than 1500 girls in 28 schools across four states and reaches thousands more through a newsletter and radio programme. This programme is intended not only to enhance sexual health but to empower girls across their roles and experiences in their communities, in fact to be agents of community change that create enabling conditions for women and girls to protect and enjoy their sexual rights (see www.gpnigeria.org).
Another example is the work of Afroreggae with young women and men in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using art, afro-Brazilian culture and education, the organisation promotes social inclusion, social justice and citizenship. The goal is to build girls’ and boys’ self-esteem and agency as a strategy to steer them away from the endemic violence of poverty and organised crime. Recognising the very high prevalence of teenage pregnancy and HIV among young people in these communities, peer educators encourage girls and boys to explore their gender, sexuality and sexual rights concerns through music and theatre venues. Afroreggae also works closely with local schools and businesses to maximise young people’s access to education and employment opportunities and create alternative routes for personal development (see www.afroreggae.com.br).
A second and related strategy is that many of these programmes do not explicitly focus on or have a stated intention on ‘promoting the sexual rights of girls’. Instead, such promotion is often woven into the very fabric of efforts and activities that are charged with intervening at a broader level of young people’s lives, including rethinking sexuality and in particular the notion that girls are sexual people with rights to their sexuality and sexual pleasure, as well as boys not having right of access to girls’ bodies as potential property. A shared strength of these programmes is that they are built on the premise that adolescents, especially older ones, are sexual beings and are likely to be sexually active. As such, activities are not guided by the notion there is something wrong that needs to be prevented or fixed but instead support and reinforce healthy and less risky sexual choices. This dimension is critical to creating the basic conditions for young women understanding and feeling empowered to claim sexual rights and for young men to be respectful as well.
A third quality is the consistent emphasis programmes place on relational and social contexts for young people’s development in general and their sexuality in particular. Not only is a rights-based framework undergirding these efforts, we also discern an ethic of care and connection as a fundamental characteristic for reaching young people (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan et al. 1990) which is generally not embraced in rights-based work (R. Petchesky, personal communication 2008). Effective approaches frequently include mentoring, peer-led education and social networking components.
Straight Talk, a communications youth-centred sexuality and reproductive health initiative launched by the Kenya Association of Professional Counsellors (KAPC), facilitates collaborative partnerships with young people with the aim of developing coping strategies and life skills that will help young people remain in control of their behaviour. At the core of all Straight Talk activities is youth participation. The initiative aims to foster peer-to-peer discussion of sexuality, gender and HIV by encouraging young people to share opinions about and experiences with confronting high-risk situations and by helping them develop behaviour-negotiation skills through role-playing activities. Hosted within schools across the country, Straight Talk Clubs discuss issues raised in the newspaper, hear guest speakers, visit health centres and the disabled and engage in community service projects. Another goal is to increase dialogue between young people and teachers, and between young people and their parents to stimulate cross-generational dialogue and community support systems (see www.comminit.com).
A fourth characteristic is the centrality of acknowledging and challenging gender power arrangements that undermine girls’ sexual rights. This takes two forms: a focus on the empowerment of girls, and analysis of and challenge to gender power arrangements (and cultural norms/products) that perpetuate coercion, violence and sexual discrimination. These programmes have in parallel or are partnered with programmes for boys that educate them about social norms endorsing violence against girls and women, and encourage them to question such masculinity norms and to imagine new forms of masculinity that embrace emotional, concerned and creative equality of partnerships between women and men.
GPI (referred to earlier) is a model for educating young women about human rights and gender equality. Reaching thousands of girls every year, GPI’s comprehensive curriculum is infused with vital information about gender relations and girls’ rights and responsibilities, empowering them to take control of their reproductive and sexual lives and realise their full potential as individuals. Their successes include supporting young women to challenge community practices (genital cutting, refusal to sell condoms to girls) and providing them with the information they need to champion their goals, needs and desire (Tolman et al. 2005).
The Conscientising Male Adolescents (CMA) programme, also in Nigeria, has worked with adolescent boys and men under 20 to counter the social prejudices against women by instilling in a generation of youth a new set of values, human rights and citizenship, as well as manhood. The programme teaches respect, health and faithfulness – and in the process helps to prevent and protect young women and men from violence, coercion and risky behaviours (see www.iwhc.org).
Similarly, Instituto Promundo is a NGO working in Brazil and other developing countries to promote more equitable power relations between men and women with the goal of changing the prevailing culture of violence. It has demonstrated the importance of addressing gender norms in programmes for young men to prevent HIV/STIs and violence and promote sexual and reproductive health for boys is critical. Through research, workshops and community-based campaigns the organisation’s workers have also demonstrated a critical association between higher levels of education and support for more equitable norms and the critical thinking skills necessary for the development for questioning inequitable or more traditional norms reinforcing the need for broader cross-sectoral approaches in this work (see www.promundo.org.br).
A fifth characteristic is being anchored in communities and commitment to community change (specifically around HIV, sexuality and reproductive health). While all the programmes cited earlier illustrate the importance of community intervention, particularly since so many young people in the developing world are not in school, another example is the work of the International Centre for Reproductive and Sexual Rights (INCRESE). Based in central Nigeria, where sharia (Islamic law) has posed a serious threat to girls’ and women’s rights since 2002, INCRESE is advocating for sexual rights among the country’s most disenfranchised groups, including young people, survivors of sexual violence and sex workers. Through its education and community programmes, INCRESE seeks to promote an understanding of sexual rights that is both protective (the right to say no) and affirmative (right to sexual expression), and challenges the culture of silence around sexuality despite fundamentalist religious opposition (see www.increse-increse.org).
A sixth strategy is that programmes often use innovative media and communication tools to educate the public, mobilise support, build knowledge and influence attitudes and knowledge. One powerful example is the programmes being developed by the Centre for Integral Support of the Adolescent (CRIA) in Brazil, which uses theatre, dance and music to raise awareness of the daily issues girls and boys face in relation to their sexuality, reproductive health, HIV infection and physical violence. Working with predominately poor black youth in Bahia in the northeast of Brazil, CRIA trains girls and boys to use dramatic arts to stimulate discussion between teens, as well as within families, classrooms and in the broader community. Through this approach, CRIA has succeeded in building collaborative relationships with education and health officials. They have successfully influenced the curriculum on sex education of local public schools. At the same time, young people build their own self-confidence and communication skills (see www.cria.org.br.).
Last, effective programmes have strong advocacy and alliance building components to push for sexual health and rights reform and policy change. This advocacy experience has contributed to girls’ empowerment and strengthened their leadership skills, thus not focused on but still enabling them to critique the undermining of their sexual rights and developing their sense of entitlement to living full lives, including having sexual rights and healthy sexuality.
The Nigerian NGO Action Health Incorporated (AHI) has initiated peer-led ‘life planning’ clubs in schools to address the growing rates of teenage pregnancy and HIV and other STIs and lack of education about sexuality and reproduction. When the Ministry of Health shut down the clubs in 1992, claiming sexuality would corrupt Nigeria’s youth, AHI youth and staff and their allies organised to lift the ban. They carried out an intensive media campaign and the government began to back down. The clubs were reinstated. After that victory, the coalition sought to have a wider policy impact. In 1996, it participated in the development of ‘Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Nigeria’ and won approval from the National Council on Education to introduce them into all of Nigeria’s schools. Today, AHI continues to collaborate with a network of governmental and non-governmental organisations, community leaders, media practitioners, trade unions, parents and young people to share knowledge and resources and expand sexual rights policy within the region (see www.actionhealthinc.org).
Another poignant example is the work of ELIGE, Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights, in Mexico that empowers young women and men through activism and mobilising. The Network has played a key role in defending girls’ and women’s sexual and reproductive rights in the region and more recently was very involved in successful advocacy efforts to change the criminal code on abortion in Mexico City (see www.elige.net).
In this chapter, we have argued that the sexual rights of adolescent girls and young women are missing as part of public and private discussions, and public discourse and debates about young people’s sexuality and their overall development in the USA, in contrast to many countries in the developing world. To identify ‘rough maps’ for instigating and mobilising a comparably bold commitment to girls’ sexual rights in the USA, we have reviewed a number of programmes and interventions in developing countries to elucidate seven topographic components from efforts targeting the sexual health and/or the overall development of youth that are also enacting a commitment to the sexual rights of girls.
How might we use this information to shape sexuality, sexual rights, and thereby sexual health and education for girls in countries such as the USA, where the infrastructure and enabling conditions are in many ways superior to those in the developing world, yet where the commitment to girls’ sexual rights has yet to be made? We return to the urgency and opportunity of this possibly unique historical moment, perhaps a deep but narrow window for the kind of profound change that we believe young people and those who care about them are hungering and ready for.
Surprisingly perhaps, the separation of sexuality from the fabric of society is less marked in many parts of the developing world, which facilitates more holistic and integrative approaches addressing sexuality as a nexus of other aspects of life. It is notable that many of these programmes have developed ways to creatively operate outside the formal education system, allowing them to reach broader cross-sections of young people as well as other relevant actors, such as policymakers and community elders.
A commitment to girls’ sexual rights may provide a fulcrum in the USA, a catalyst, for linking the restless rumbling and outright outrage at the spiralling commodification of sexuality to the legacy of fear about – and a vacuum of entitlement to – healthy sexuality and relationships, the detritus left by a decade of abstinenceonly sex education and the urgent yet narrow focus on fighting for access to even the most basic information for young people in the USA. This struggle has left many of those who care about young people’s sexuality in a rut, which needs to be exited so that we can consider, be open to and imagine other approaches to the enhancement of healthy sexuality and its development. Taking the initiative from the bold and creative, often courageous, work of those in developing countries, we have rough maps for what it will take to inspire, instigate and inform a redirection towards larger social change.
Taken together, these observations force us to recognise and confront a very difficult reality, the growing understanding in such developing countries that girls’ (and the women they become) sexual rights are at the heart of social and economic rights and development and transformational change, not an add-on or the elephant in the room to be feared, manipulated or ignored. These programmes taken together illuminate the necessity for linkages among the different kinds of institution, space and actor where community-based work is much needed and can thrive. They provide a menu of possible routes for how countries such as the USA can move away from walled-off sex education that has remained so bound by the limits of public discourse and panicked anxiety. These seven components suggest that it is unlikely that a continued, exclusive emphasis on schools will yield the kind of ‘education’ and social change that a sexual rights agenda requires and inspires. Ironically, adolescent and young people’s sexuality may be overly designated to ‘safe spaces’ such as schools and family planning clinics thus maintaining its atomised status outside the then untouched fabric of society, which is where a sexual rights approach may be ushered in.
From this perspective, there are some untapped leads that become visible for transforming budding boulevards into fast-track highways to enable us to act quickly and gain more traction to build momentum for a grassroots’ movement for girls’ sexual rights. There are efforts dedicated to youth development in the USA that may offer fertile ground for articulating and planting seeds for a social movement for girls’ sexual rights, where young people learn through various media for instance to develop critical perspectives and hone their sense of social justice rather than simply commit to preventing bad sexual outcomes. There are other places outside schools where young people and those who care about them gather that may be ready to engage girls’ sexual rights, as disparate as progressive churches, mother–daughter workshops, community centres, organisations supporting girls’ and young people’s overall wellbeing, web-based social networks for girls, innovative interventions using text messages, if girls’ sexual rights and the ‘rough maps’ that developing countries offer us are disseminated through public discourse and new technologies. Linking disparate programmes, interventions and conversations through a shared stated commitment to girls’ sexual rights may transform into a less rough map of a social movement for sexual rights of girls that are real, not the airbrushed commodities with which girls more than anybody currently struggle. These programmes, strategies and places offer ramps for initiating such a social movement. What we are suggesting is that an explicit commitment to girls’ and young women’s sexual rights may offer the impetus for paradigm change that many are seeking in the post-abstinence-only US landscape.
Such a social movement cannot be legislated for, slotted into a curriculum or mandated, although changes in these societal organising tools can and should be critical first steps. A movement for girls’ sexual rights will challenge the terms of demands for evidence-based interventions, because a change in what constitute successful outcomes will become evident. A movement pushes for change through symbiotic wrangling with the terms of public debate. We believe these lessons offer alternative paths, moving away from an exclusive focus on school-based sex education curricula towards broader community engagement, responsibility and demands for girls’ and young women’s sexual rights. A sexual rights movement explicitly for girls and young women is necessary as a next step to building an inclusive social movement for changing the way we talk about, understand and experience sexuality in the USA.
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