Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. C. Women and Health – Paragraphs 107(a)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/03
Strategic objective C.2.
Strengthen preventive programmes that promote women’s health
Actions to be taken
107. By Governments, in cooperation with non-governmental organizations, the mass media, the private sector and relevant international organizations, including United Nations bodies, as appropriate:
a. Give priority to both formal and informal educational programmes that support and enable women to develop self-esteem, acquire knowledge, make decisions on and take responsibility for their own health, achieve mutual respect in matters concerning sexuality and fertility and educate men regarding the importance of women’s health and well-being, placing special focus on programmes for both men and women that emphasize the elimination of harmful attitudes and practices, including female genital mutilation, son preference (which results in female infanticide and prenatal sex selection), early marriage, including child marriage, violence against women, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, which at times is conducive to infection with HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, drug abuse, discrimination against girls and women in food allocation and other harmful attitudes and practices related to the life, health and well-being of women, and recognizing that some of these practices can be violations of human rights and ethical medical principles;
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The health and wellbeing of girls and women, especially in a knowledge-based economy, are intimately linked to twinned-up with the quality and ubiquity of the educational provisions available to them. This particular section of paragraph 107 deals with the means by which women and girls can be advanced and also self-empower (few will do the studying for them).
The ability to earn an education, for many families around the world, is a great honour and boost to the sense of self, self-confidence, and moves someone, typically, further towards self-actualization. The chance to get some education, especially regarding her own health, is one of the most consequential moves for women, too.
It becomes the basis for making independent or autonomous choices in regards to reproduction. The decisions to have children or not, when, how many, and under what circumstances become one of the most consequential in a woman’s life.
It is a fundamental right to be in control over one’s own body, as most men are, and also in who one is intimate with or not. But we can continually see this violated with the cases of female genital mutilation, in the tens of millions, and the preference of son consequences with female infanticide and then the sex selection for boys over girls.
This happens in both religious and secular circumstances, by the way; thus, the phenomenon crosses two of the biggest divides known in the world. The consequences of child marriage are devastating as well, cutting off the life prospects of a girl right at the root, truncating her.
Furthermore, there has been the ongoing Social Interest Group Human Rights calls focusing on violence against women in general with an emphasis for the past two or more months on physical violence against women.
It is, in this, where we find them – women – having continuing problems of vulnerability in a number of domains, especially tragic showing in the cases of “sexual exploitation, sexual abuse,” and other forms of sexual violence against women.
Here we find the starkly disproportionately negative treatment of women around the world, it requires an extensive public relations system to ignore, downplay, or divert attention from these facts.
Then, not only in education but in food allocation, women will, often, be given less than the men. It can even come in the subtle and harmful attitudes followed by practices with women impacted more negatively than men in health, well-being, and, thus, life outcomes.
It is important to recognize and acknowledge women’s rights as fundamentally human rights and then move towards the implementation and actualization of those rights linked to some of the basic medical ethical precepts – such as “do no harm” – in order to provide the upcoming and adult populations of women the best chance at success in life to create the more equal world desired by much of the international consensus without waffling or holding women back in any way.
–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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