By Kiconco Arthur
The
right to age specific sexual and reproductive health information, education and
services is a prerequisite for both adolescents and adults to deal positively
and responsibly with their sexuality. However, programs and policies are mostly
designed for specific groups failing to address all the age groups making it a
myth to achieve gender equality and reproductive health and rights. Sexual and
reproductive health is acknowledged as a universal human right as per the 1994
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).
Gender
and sexuality should be taken vital in policy and decision making as they
combine to make a serious impact on the quality of life- between well and ill
being as well as life and death in cases where violence is the outcome. The
failure to recognize Sexuality, Gender, Rights and Justice as a strong
component has therefore led to a couple of issues of which the following cannot
escape mention:
Sexual and Reproductive Health
(SRH)
Sexual
and Reproductive Health encompasses health and wellbeing in matters related to
sexual relations, pregnancy and private aspects of people’s lives making it
difficult to deal with especially writing about and discussing publicly. As a
result, there is always public misunderstanding of sexuality matters and the
actual sensitiveness plus taboos surrounding sexuality also prevent people from
seeking sexual and reproductive health information and care making the
addressing of the issues too difficult.
However,
SRH is vital as far as social and economic development is concerned. For
example, when women die during child birth, abortion or due to HIV/AIDS, their
children are orphaned and if girls are to take over their siblings, they miss
school. When the girls dropout of school, they are also liable to early
marriages hence early pregnancy which couples with low literacy due to early pregnancy and significantly
affect their health as well as limiting their opportunities to contribute to
community development and productivity.
Female genital
Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C)
Globally,
a good number of women have undergone genital mutilation/cutting most of whom
are usually mutilated between ages of four (4) and twelve (12). Besides its
consequences, it is widely recognized as a human rights violation, has no
medical benefits and is not mandated by any religion or government. It causes
many immediate and long-term mental and physical health risks including
extensive bleeding, tetanus, cysts and sexual dysfunction.
Besides
the health effects, FGM/C has many social and economic effects; for example, in
Kween district in Eastern Uganda, women are divided into two groups of
“uncircumcised” referring to those who have not undergone genital mutilation
and the “circumcised” referring to those who have not undergone genital
mutilation. The two groups are considered and treated differently in the
communities throughout the district where the circumcised are favoured compared
to the uncircumcised. The circumcised women are accepted to collect grain from
the local granaries and are allowed to milk cows while their uncircumcised
counterparts are not allowed. Back in time, people in the same district even
had a belief that whenever a man married an uncircumcised woman would die.
Most of the East Africa countries have
enacted laws to prohibit FGM/C, but their implementation isn’t active. Despite
of the presence of laws, FGM/C has continued in most communities with even
medical workers carrying out the procedure as parents seek safer ways to
continue the practice.
In addition to FGM/C, other issues of concern
as far as sexuality and rights are concerned include virginity tests, forced
marriages, sexual harassment, rape and incest as practiced in many traditions
and ignored in most cases yet they pose a threat to both social and economic
development.
Abortion
Many adolescents as well as women who become
pregnant unintentionally resort to abortion. Unintended pregnancies have
multiple issues when it comes to adolescents and unmarried women as society
tend to feel like they are party of everyone’s body and look at it as a taboo
and even sometimes lead to family neglect and dismissal of the culprits.
At the same time, abortion is illegal in most
developing countries including Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. As a result,
many women do not access safe procedures of abortion and resort to unsafe ones
which sometimes leads to the death of the victims which compose a big
percentage of maternal deaths worldwide. About one in five pregnancies each
year are voluntarily aborted and nearly a half of the abortions are performed
unsafely.
In some countries, abortion is only legally
acceptable when it is the only option targeted to save a woman’s life and in
Malawi, spousal authorization is required before performing the procedure.
Sexual Orientation and gender
Identity
Sexual
Orientation and gender Identity are not uniform across the human race and most
of the times, when one person’s sexual orientation or gender identity doesn’t
conform to the majority; he/she is targeted for discrimination and at times
abuse. Irrespective of the fact that the universal declaration of human rights
calls for anyone to enjoy all the human rights, millions of people continue to
suffer execution, torture, imprisonment, violence and discrimination due to
their gender identity or sexual orientation.
The list
of abuses suffered are limitless, the following are just a few:
·
The
individuals are prosecuted, beaten by police or mobs and sometimes killed
because their private relationship is deemed to be a social danger. In Uganda,
David Kato, a gay activist was hit with metal bars during mob justice and died
of injuries following the passing of the anti-gay bill in Parliament in the
early 2011.
·
In
other cases, women are raped as a cure of their lesbianism even sometimes
backed by their parents or subjected to verbal abuse and bullying in schools.
All the
above, lead to the violation of the rights of children, inhuman and degrading
treatment, infliction of torture and cruelty, detention on grounds of identity
and/or beliefs as well as restriction of the freedom of association which form
the core of the agenda of the human rights laws.
Sexual
Health Risks
Research shows
that in East Africa, young women of ages fourteen to twenty four are two and a
half times more likely to be infected with HIV compared to younger men because
the women are biologically more susceptible than heterosexual men to becoming
infected and their husbands or sexual partners tend to be older than them and
likely to have had previous sexual partners hence already infected with HIV.
More so, young women are often unable to negotiate safer sex and condom use
with their sexual partners as well as often lack access to sexual and
reproductive health information and services.
Females also
require a lot of privacy due to their characteristics and nature of their life.
In institutions, they are supposed to have clean convenience venues and the absence
of such leads to school dropouts at young ages of life which has multiple
consequences as far as socio-economic development as well as their quality of
life is concerned.
Sexuality and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Sexuality, sexual
rights and sexual health are related to almost all the MDGs making it mandatory
to consider them if the MDGs targets are to be realized. For example; the
availability and accessibility of quality sexual and reproductive health
services, information and education on sexuality; the guarantee of the right to
free choice of sexual and marriage partners, making individual decisions about
child bearing, pursuing satisfying, safe and pleasurable sexual lives
significantly contribute to gender equality and empowerment especially for
women linked to MDG 3; access to primary education as it may reduce early
pregnancies and early marriages linked to MDG 2 and consequently to reduced
poverty levels (MDG 1); reduction of infant and child mortality (MDG 4);
improving maternal health hence reduced maternal mortality (MDG 5) and
decreased vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and other sexual transmitted
infections/diseases (MDG 6).
Sexual rights legal framework
Right from the
early 1990s, sexual rights were an issue of discussions in international
meetings almost every year up to 2000 where many rights got to be spelled in
International documents. The following are examples:
·
During the World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna
1993, the first instrument of human rights to make explicit reference to
sexual rights “the 1993 Vienna Declaration and Program of Action” was adopted
by consensus. The instrument considered elimination of gender based violence
and all forms of sexual harassment and exploitation (paragraph 18) covering
trafficking in women, rape as a weapon of war, sexual slavery and forced
pregnancy (paragraph 38).
·
Next was the International Conference on Population and
Development, Cairo 1994 where the notion of sexual rights first appeared on
the international agenda and yielded the “International
Conference on Population and Development Program of Action (ICPDPoA)” in
which several important points on sexuality were included. It mostly recognizes
the interconnection between gender and sexuality and how the interrelatedness
affects the ability of women and men to achieve and maintain sexual health and
manage their reproductive lives.
·
An during the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing
1995, sexual rights were a topic of major debate steered by an alliance of
conservative Muslims and Catholics who strongly opposed the matter. Despite the
opposition, “the Beijing Platform for
Action” was drawn in which there is paragraph 96 that affirms the rights of
women to have control of and decide freely and responsibly on matters related
to their sexuality.
·
Furthermore, the Beijing+5 Conference in 2000 also
led to inclusion of marital rape, honour crimes and forced marriages in the
outcome of the Beijing Platform for Action.
Many other United Nations (UN)
Human Rights documents have never missed to consider sexual rights as well as
prosecution of subjects who violate the rights with the UN International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda which
made a landmark decision in 1998 as was the first international
court to condemn sexual violence in a civil war and to find rape to be an act
of genocide aimed at destroying a population group, thus qualifying rape as a
crime in international law.
Irrespective of the above issues, not so much
has been done to their address in most developing countries. Therefore, sexual
and reproductive health rights continue to be a challenge despite the fact that
they are well spelled in international documents and national laws. They are
usually misunderstood/or misinterpreted by many African leaders, for example,
the East African Community Council of Health Ministers (EACCHM) refused to sign
the East African Community Sexual and Reproductive Health rights strategy in
2008 as they thought it would promote homosexuality and other sexual practices
in the region.
There is strong need for advocacy as far as Sexuality, Gender, Rights and
Justice are concerned if sustainable development is to be achieved.
