Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. C. Women and Health – Paragraph 108(c)-(e)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08
Strategic objective C.3.
Undertake gender-sensitive initiatives that address sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS, and sexual and reproductive health issues
Actions to be taken
108. By Governments, international bodies including relevant United Nations organizations, bilateral and multilateral donors and non-governmental organizations:
c. Encourage all sectors of society, including the public sector, as well as international organizations, to develop compassionate and supportive, non-discriminatory HIV/AIDS-related policies and practices that protect the rights of infected individuals;
d. Recognize the extent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in their countries, taking particularly into account its impact on women, with a view to ensuring that infected women do not suffer stigmatization and discrimination, including during travel;
e. Develop gender-sensitive multisectoral programmes and strategies to end social subordination of women and girls and to ensure their social and economic empowerment and equality; facilitate promotion of programmes to educate and enable men to assume their responsibilities to prevent HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases;
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The encouragement throughout the facets of society can be an important first step, alongside others, in the advancement and empowerment of women. The emphasis on the compassionate retains a particular resonance in a minor era of non-dispassionate and enflamed negative rhetoric about the opposition.
The compassion and supportive encouragement can help with the advancement of policies and practices that help among those most in need, e.g., those infected HIV/AIDS. It is a horrible disease if you ever read a small bit about it.
Different nations have a different set of concerns about it. Mostly, probably, around the prevalence of the disease and then the level of institutional or infrastructural support – speaking of medical and care related – for the individuals who suffer from HIV/AIDS infection.
Next, we have an impact on women through the discrimination and stigma around infection with HIV/AIDS. It is a form of magical thinking about the possibilities of contagion through being around women with HIV/AIDS.
The gendered lens – a common phrase in these conversational commentaries – is a frequent frame of reference for these documents, as these deal with the explicit or via negligence exclusion of women from the mainstream international human rights conversation.
It is incredibly important to bear these in mind, as the benefits to whole societies come from the explicit inclusion of women in the decision-making and power centers of the society.
For one, this makes use of the other half of the species. For two, this creates a more level playing field for the society. We cannot do without the efforts and input of everyone for the advancement towards solutions of some of the most pressing problems in the modern period.
This implies a significant shift in the relation of the sexes or the genders in more general terms. The explicit exclusion of women from influence and platforms on an equal basis with the men has been a continual problem throughout the history of all cultures in the world.
Often, this comes with religious injunctions. But there are larger issues related to this. The problems of overpopulation and excessive restrictions on the choices of, at least, half of the population prevent the flourishing of the nations around the world.
In literal terms, the restriction of women has been a net negative on the progression, technologically and economically, of the species with explicit moral implications about the rightness-wrongness of the repression or “social subordination of women and girls.”
The programs and initiatives of the world system should keep the flourishing of women and girls in mind because of the basis of equality of the sexes can only come in the sincere listening ear and inclusion of the bodies and minds of women in the centers of influence and power in the world, and then replicating this in the social milieu of the nation and within the family structures. Some say, “It starts in the home,” but only in part.
It starts wherever someone is at, which makes the access points of equality in all aspects of interpersonal, and intrapersonal, life. These can emerge in the foundation of educational programs geared with men in mind for the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS, especially in the basics of how HIV/AIDS spreads from men to women and how the prevention of infection of others is a personal and collective responsibility.
All these “multisectoral programmes and strategies” may not solve the issues in the short-term but set a solid foundation for the reduction via prevention of the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases while simultaneously working on the central equality of the sexes issues of the subordination of women in sociocultural life.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- 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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