An advocacy campaign launched on Tuesday aims to disseminate credible information on sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), to help adolescents make the right choices.
Religious leaders from different schools of thought will be provided with literature on SRHR for Friday sermons in urban and rural areas, according to Omer Aftab, chief executive of LifeLine, a non-governmental organisation working on health issues.
The campaign, HAYAT, is a mass awareness and advocacy campaign on SRHR for youth aimed to address the physical and emotional challenges of adolescents and suggest ways to handle them.
It is estimated that only 29% girls and 41% boys have access to correct information about puberty and hygiene, Aftab said. The campaign aims to ensure unrestricted access to reliable SRHR information for 15% of students aged between 10 and 18 years in the next five years.
The project will also target parents and teachers to motivate them to discuss these issues.
“Youngsters have easy access to pornography via internet and through cellphones. At many roadside tea stalls, owners charge [minimal charges] for showing X-rated movies at mini cinemas,” Aftab said. “We cannot stop them from unethical use, but can teach them the difference between right and wrong.”
Every month around 100 children — 68% female and 32% male — fall victim to sexual abuse.
While sharing statistics on contraception, Aftab said only 4% of married girls of 15 to 19 years use contraceptives and only 11% of the women in the age group of 20 to 24 years. This contributes to high maternal and infant mortality.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 28th, 2012.
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Are the campaigners gone nuts? The lack of proper sexual health information, especially for girl, is due to the the religiousness, and clerics have played a great role in failure of many such campaigns before. The idea to use clerics is in the hope that if the can be influenced to give the campaign go-ahead, they will be lessl ikely to harangue in mosques against SH information. But the campaigners have to make sure the literature they'll distribute to the clerics almost ignores the whole SH issue, otherwise they'll reject it as being Westernized!!! It's time religious 'authorities' stopped having such choking control over the masses.