The YP Foundation is a youth run and led organisation based in New Delhi, India, that supports and enables young people to create programmes and influence policies in the areas of gender, sexuality, health, education and governance. In the last 13 years, they have worked with 6,500 young people to develop their perspectives and critical thinking on issues of social justice and human rights, and set up over 300 projects in India, reaching out to 450,000 adolescents and young people across 18 states.
This publication includes background chapters on: Young people and sexuality: what’s the problem; and Mapping health services: what’s the evidence telling us.
The study it describes, done in collaboration with the Yeh Ek Soch Foundation, Lucknow, had four objectives: to generate evidence through youth-centred processes; create a cadre of young leaders equipped to advocate for and assess stigma-free health services, including abortion counselling and provision; and contribute to existing information on the availability and quality of existing health services, especially abortion services. The study took place in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, with a population of almost 3 million, where health service needs are high and health care needs of adolescents are largely unmet.
The study finds a “deep discomfort that the society at large feels with regard to young people’s ability to make decisions, especially with relation to their sexuality, in the context of moral standards that legitimise sex only within marriage without awareness of the age at which young people have sex.
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SOURCE: Seen Not Heard, YP Foundation, http://www.theypfoundation.org/publications/