Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. C. Women and Health – Paragraph 93
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/22
93. Discrimination against girls, often resulting from son preference, in access to nutrition and health-care services endangers their current and future health and well-being. Conditions that force girls into early marriage, pregnancy and child-bearing and subject them to harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation, pose grave health risks. Adolescent girls need, but too often do not have, access to necessary health and nutrition services as they mature. Counselling and access to sexual and reproductive health information and services for adolescents are still inadequate or lacking completely, and a young woman’s right to privacy, confidentiality, respect and informed consent is often not considered. Adolescent girls are both biologically and psychosocially more vulnerable than boys to sexual abuse, violence and prostitution, and to the consequences of unprotected and premature sexual relations. The trend towards early sexual experience, combined with a lack of information and services, increases the risk of unwanted and too early pregnancy, HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as unsafe abortions. Early child-bearing continues to be an impediment to improvements in the educational, economic and social status of women in all parts of the world. Overall, for young women early marriage and early motherhood can severely curtail educational and employment opportunities and are likely to have a long-term, adverse impact on the quality of their lives and the lives of their children. Young men are often not educated to respect women’s self-determination and to share responsibility with women in matters of sexuality and reproduction.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Paragraph 93 of the Beijing Declaration looks into the young among us. Internationally, we can find a culture that deep favours boys and men The reason for this comes from cultural and family tradition, not necessarily religious.The reasons given are for the preference of the male child over the others. These restrictions in the preference in the favour of boys and against girls comes with cultural consequences as well. Why?If a society rather explicitly prefers girls over boys, this can produce consequences in the number of resources that the society provides to the girls. It can also be in the ways in which the society restricts and punishes girls compared to boys, or at the expense of girls for boys.Take, for example, the listed example of female genital mutilation, estimated at 200 million girls and women, as well as “early marriage, pregnancy and child-bearing.” But what are the consequences for the boys here? Not as much as girls.The girls can have any of the host of coinciding problems in health outcomes based on these practices. These pose significant health risks, especially as many of the contexts in which this happens are unsanitary, non-medical, and in very poor circumstances.The problems in discrimination against girls can happen with the lack of respect for their privacy, lack of counselling and other care, and simply being subject to a number of other possible harm straight from the society to the girls including forms of violence, including sexual slavery and exploitation, and improper sexual education.That form of poor education for a higher degree of lack of self-knowledge leads to a higher level of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted/unplanned pregnancies in girls who are, in essence, still mentally children and trying to grow up. But they have had these thrust onto them via the sexism of the society.With childbearing too early in life, the restrictions are against the women and in favour of the men. That is to say, the economic, social, and political realms, and the educational world are open to the men and boys without these worries, not so for the women and the girls.There also comes the privileged mindset of the boys and men, thinking the bodies of women simply amount to extensions of their own. Meaning, boys and men raised or inborn with the notion of women lacking less autonomy than them, leading to a complete disrespect for the self-determination of the women in their lives regarding sexuality and reproduction.So it goes.–
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).Beijing Declaration(1995).United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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