What Benefit do Sexual Health Services Provide?

All adolescents should have access to sexual health care, including family planning, in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle. But it seems as though more needs to be done in humanitarian settings to meet this need for refugee adolescents. The Women’s Refugee Commission and Save the Children have combined forces with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations Population Fund to try to tackle this problem. The need for better reproductive health care for adolescents is extremely urgent and the statistics are worrying health professionals, who claim that two million girls under 15 years of age give birth every year – these girls have an increased risk of maternal mortality than other groups. The figures show that half of the sexual assaults are committed against girls under 15. The lack of community and family structures weakens the traditional forms of protection and leads to unusual behavioural patterns, which means that child-bearing risks are very high, as are the levels of exploitation and sexual violence. Forced early marriage amongst these young girls is not uncommon either.

A report conducted by WRC and Save the Children found that only 37 programmes were focused on the sexual health needs of 10 to 19 year olds since 2009. Only 21 of these offered more than two methods of contraception, and funding was equally low. In spite of the work that still needs to be done to improve these services, there were encouraging aspects of the report that provided some hope for the adolescents in need of them. There were various instances of notable practice in humanitarian settings which could serve as a guide for improving programming and increasing the access to reproductive health care for teens. There were common findings for the successful programmes, in that they built trust amongst the communities and built support by engaging parents, teachers and community leaders. They also worked to build the adolescents themselves by developing them as full participants in the assessment and design of the programmes.