Emerging leaders Forum Alumni participating in One Billion Rising, Fiji. Photo: Emerging Leaders Forum Alumni As young women, we are sexualized in the media, harassed on the street as sexual objects, and married as girls before we may even know what sex is. Our life experiences are defined by sexuality, and yet the right to make decisions about our own bodies, to experience pleasure, to discover our sexual preferences remains taboo and even criminal. Sexual and reproductive health and rights policies that affect us have long been developed and defined by others, with minimal involvement of young women and girls. To change this, young feminist activists are forging solutions at the local, national, regional and international levels, reclaiming their sexuality, demanding control over their own bodies and their rights.
Over the last twenty years we have seen progress in women’s sexual and reproductive rights through agreements around the International Conference on Population and Development and its review conferences, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and important regional agreements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. More governments from the global south are speaking out in favour of our rights to decide if, when and with whom we have children. This is a direct result of the hard work of feminists and the womens movement from all ages and countries pushing for a policy shift, from population control to recognizing women’s bodily autonomy.
Despite these advances sexual and reproductive rights continue to be the deal breaker in national, regional and global policy spaces. This is in part due to challenges posed by ultra-conservative and fundamentalists groups which use the discourse of culture and tradition to scapegoat the fulfillment of human rights, in particular of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This is true when reproductive rights are reduced only to mean abortion and sexual rights only to mean homosexuality, when in reality they encompass a wide range of integrated rights and issues. The reductionist approach is a tactic that conservative governments and organized groups have taken to undermine advances in women’s human rights.
