Taking sex education to young people who are not in schools
From the developing world to the UK, the statistics are clear: teenagers who miss out on education are more likely to have sex younger, less likely to use contraception, and more likely to get pregnant.
A survey carried out as part of the 2001 census in the UK showed that fewer than half of teenage mothers were going to school when they got pregnant. About a quarter of boys and a third of girls who left school at 16 with no qualifications did not use contraception when they first had sex, compared to only 6% of boys and 8% girls who stayed on till 17 or over and got qualifications.
A 2008 study of 38 mostly poor, developing countries found that 15- to 17-year-old girls who were enrolled in school were less likely to have had sex than girls who weren’t in education. Nearly 13 million adolescent girls give birth each year in developing countries; a girl growing up in Chad is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to attend secondary school, according to the IPPF. But if a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, on average she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.
Leaving school also affects chances of picking up STIs: studies of HIV in Africa and Latin America have found that education lowers women’s risk of infection and the prevalance of risky behaviour.
Without the natural hub for young people that is created by school to rely on, how do sexual health professionals ensure the most vulnerable teenagers get much needed education and access to services?
Read the rest here.
P.S. This is one of the many reasons providing quality online sex education is so very important.
“Women on Waves sails a ship around the world to countries where abortion is illegal. They work with local organizations to transport women 12 miles off shore into international waters where they can give abortions at sea.”
Always reblog.
Brings tears to my eyes. Such a beautiful organization.
(Source: stephherold)
[TW: ableism, classism, forced sterilisation] It has to be said…
I’m not denying that prochoice conversations can and do have ableism problems, full stop. But people like to counter this with copious amount of classism. Feminists are usually really good at understanding that choices don’t happen in a vacuum, but on this subject their minds go completely blank. No abortion or pregnancy needs to be justified, but to humor you here are some reasons someone might abort a fetus with a possible disability:
- They themselves are disabled and they don’t want that life for their child.
- They themselves are disabled and they know they can’t care for a child, let alone a disabled one.
- They are in poverty and cannot afford a child with special needs, nor do they have the support system to give such a child adequate care.
- They live in a society that devalues disabled people and therefore have ingrained ableist attitudes or stigma.
We live in a world of ignorance and hate, where even the moral model of disability still has substantial cultural traction. Cerrie Burnell
was denied a role onreceived multiple complaints for appearing on children’s television with one hand, which some claimed was “too scary”. Riam Dean was shoved in a stockroom for violating the “Look Policy” of Abercrombie & Fitch – by having a prosthetic arm. We read books where it’s hipster-hilarious to punish Mr Wickham for his sins by paralysing him in a carriage accident, and to punish Lydia for her sluttery by making her change his soiled linens. We are around service providers who think Gregory House is an instructive case study. We have been brought up with images of the village idiot, the pitiable invalid, the circus freak, the insane murderer, the disfigured outcast, the crippled villain. We have been raised to see people with disabilities as disgusting, repulsive, frightening, and even evil. We have been socialised to see people with disabilities as either impossible to love or desire, or the object of “deviant” fetish. (source)
- They are given biased information about their fetus’ potential disability by a doctor that scares them into abortion for the “fetus’ sake.”
- They aren’t ableist at all but have an aversion to their future child suffering (this suffering may be real or exaggerated depending on how much objective information they’ve been given).
- They live in a society that ridicules disabled people and the people that knowingly choose to give birth to them. A society that lacks resources, support groups, and accessibility.
And we live in a world where mothers of children with disabilities struggle. We live in a world where women with children are disproportionately poor, where some are denied healthcare on the basis of disability, where carers are badly underpaid, where childcare and respite and educational options are constrained. We live in a world where we know that children with disabilities will grow up to deal with all of the negative attitudes that the moral and medical models bring to society (source).
- They may be disabled and suffer from ableist attitudes from other people who think they shouldn’t be able to have children.
- They may be scared that if they are in poverty, or god forbid an immigrant, their disabled children will be forcibly taken from them by the state to be adopted by a picturesque rich white family.
- They may have other disabled children to take care of.
- Any combination of the above. This list is not exhaustive.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Are you seeing a lot of variability and unpredictability? Are you seeing many different circumstances? Are you seeing societal issues in addition to individual attitudes which may be prejudiced? Yeah?
Like with any other abortion, you don’t know a pregnant person’s circumstances. No pregnancy and no abortion has to be justified. We can have meaningful and important conversations about ableist language within the prochoice community, and we should. What we shouldn’t have are people drawing arbitrary lines that separate valid from invalid reasons for abortion, nor should we encourage positions which lack nuance and ignore the lived realities of pregnant people whose choices are often influenced by larger societal problems.
This is such an amazing post. People on both sides of the abortion debate should read and learn.
soft and sweet: also, this is probably as good a time as any to start talking about:...
also, this is probably as good a time as any to start talking about:
[BAD IN BED]
So, my idea is for this zine thing called Bad in Bed that explores the similarities/connections between sexual needs and access needs. Or writes about sex as a series of access needs.
Basically I’ve always…
(Transcript via Womanist Musings)
Transcript.
Butler: I thought that we should take this walk together and one of the things I wanted to talk about was what it means for us to take a walk together. When I first asked you about this, you told me you take walks you take strolls.
Taylor: I do
Butler: And can you say something about what that is for you? When do you do it, and how do you do it, and what words do you have for it?
Taylor: I think that I always go for a walk, probably everyday I go for a walk and umm I always tell people that I am going for a walk; I use that word, and most of the disabled people that I know use that word also.
Butler: Which environments make it possible for you to take a walk?
Taylor: I moved to San Francisco largely because it is the most accessible place in the world and part of what is so amazing to be about it is the physical access, the fact that public transportation is accessible, there’s curb cuts most places, most places I’ll go there’s curb cuts, buildings are accessible and what this does is that it also leads to a social acceptability. Somehow because there’s physical access, there’s simply more disabled people out and about in the world and so people have learned how to interact with them and are used to them in a certain way and so the physical access also leads to a social access, an acceptance.
Butler: It must be nice to not always be the pioneer.
Taylor: yes definitely.
Butler: The very first one. To have to explain.
Taylor: To be the first disabled person they’ve ever seen.
Butler: You do speak, and talk and move and enjoy life and suffer many of the same heartaches that you do. Anyways, what I am wondering about is moving in social space. Right, like all the movements you can do and which help you live and which express you in various ways, do you feel free to move in all of the ways you wanna move?
Taylor: I could go into a coffee shop and actually pick up the cup with my mouth and carry it to my table but then that, that becomes almost more difficult because of the, just the normalizing standards of our movements and the discomfort that, that causes when I do things with body parts that aren’t necessarily what we assume that they’re for. That seems to be even more hard for people to deal with.
( they walk by a running shoe on the pavement)
Butler: Is that someone’s shoe?
Taylor: Yeah that someone’s shoe. I wonder if they can walk without it?
Butler: I’m just thinking that no one takes a walk without there being a technique of walking. Nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk, umm outside of ourselves. Maybe we have a false idea that the able bodied person is somehow radically self sufficient.
Taylor: Yeah. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s about 20 or 21 that I became aware of disability as a political issue and that happened largely through discovering the social model which is basically: In disability they have a distinction between disability and impairment.
Butler: Yeah
Taylor: So impairment would be my body, my embodiment right now. The fact that I was born with (unable to discern condition) which effects, or what the medical world has labeled (unable to discern condition) but basically my joints are fused, my muscles are weaker, I can’t move in certain ways and this does effect my life in all sorts of situations, for instance there’s a plum tree in my backyard and I can’t pick the plums. I have to wait for them to drop. So, there’s that embodiment, our own unique embodiment and then there’s disability, which is basically the social repression of disabled people: The fact that disabled have limited housing options, we don’t have career opportunities, we’re socially isolated. You know in many ways, there’s a social aversion to disabled people.
Butler: So would disability be the social organization of impairment?
Taylor: The disabling effects basically of society.
Butler: What happened? Did you come into contact with disability activists? Did your read certain things?
Taylor: A read a book review actually.
Butler: Oh really?
Taylor: Yeah, and what that happened actually, I lived in Brooklyn. I would really try to make myself go out and just order a coffee by myself and I would sit for hours beforehand in the park just trying to get up the nerve to do that. In a way it’s a political protest for me to go in and order a coffee and demand help, simply because in my opinion help is something that we all need.
Butler: Yes
Taylor: And it is something that is looked down upon and not really taken care of in this society. When we all need help.
Butler: yes
Taylor: and we’re all interdependent in specific ways. Should we stop and get me something warm?
The two walk into a second hand shop, where Taylor purchases a red sweater after Butler helps her to put it on.
Butler: I think gender and disability converge in a whole lot of ways. But one thing I think both movements do, is get us to rethink what the body can do. There’s an essay by Gilles Deleuze called, What can a body do? And the question is supposed to challenge the traditional way in which we think about bodies. We usually ask what is a body, or what is the ideal form of a body, or you know, what’s the difference between a body and a soul and that can of thing but What can a body do, is a different question. It isolates a set of capacities, instrumentalities or organs and we are an assemblage of those things. I like this idea. It’s not like there’s an essence and it’s not like there’s an ideal morphology. You know, what a body should look like. It’s exactly not that question. Or what a body should move like. One of the things I’ve found when talking about gender and even violence against sexual minorities or gender minorities, people whose gender presentation does not conform with standard ideals of femininity or masculinity is that very often it comes down to how people walk, you know how they use their hips, what they do with their body parts, what they use their mouths for, what they use their anus for or what they allow their anus to be used for.
There’s a guy in Maine, who I guess he was around 18 years old and he walked with a very distinct swish. You know, hips going one way or another; a very distinct feminine walk. One day he was walking to school and he was attacked by three of his classmates and he was thrown over a bridge and he was killed. The question that community has to deal with and the entire media that covered this event was: how could it be that somebody’s gait, that somebody’s style of walking could engender the desire to kill that person. And that you know makes me think about the walk in a different way. A walk can be a dangerous thing.
Taylor: Just remember when I was little, when I did walk I would be told that I walked like a monkey and I think that for a lot of disabled people that the violence and the sort of hatred exists alot in this reminding of people that our bodies are going to age and going to do die. And in some ways I wonder, just thinking about the monkey comment if it is also (and this is just a thought off the top of my head right now) if it is where our boundaries lie as human and what becomes non human.
Butler: It makes me wonder whether the person was anti-evolutionary. Whether they were creationists. It’s like, why shouldn’t we have some resemblance to the monkey?
Taylor: Well the monkey has actually been my favourite animal too. Quite a lot of that time I was flattered.
Butler: Exactly
Taylor: When in those in-between moments of you know in between male and female, in between death and health, when do you still count as a human?
Butler: My sense that what is at stake here is really re-thinking the human as a site of interdependency. And I think when you move into the coffee shop, if I can go back to that for a moment and you ask for the coffee or you indeed ask for some assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the question that do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other. Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs and are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal individual issue or your personal issue? So there’s a challenge there’s a challenge to individualism that happens at the moment that you ask for some assistance with your coffee cup and hopefully people will take it up and say yes I too live in that world in which I understand that we need each other in order to understand our basic needs and I want to organize a social and political world on the basis of that recognition.
