ABSTRACT
Sexual rights for adolescent girls and young women are at a precarious yet also unprecedented historical moment. While the concept of these rights has achieved a potentially powerful public status in many parts of the world, their full articulation and promotion remains fragile. Ironically, this instability is particularly pervasive in the USA, where the politicisation and commodification of young women’s sexuality has combined with the practice of keeping education, health and development in ‘separate silos’, working in a parallel rather than an integrated way. In this chapter, we would like to suggest that this silo effect is brought into relief and alternative approaches become evident in examining effective efforts that support girls’ sexual rights in developing countries. We will begin by briefly reviewing the concept of sexual rights for girls and how they are addressed globally and in the USA. Based on a review of programmes and interventions in the developing world that seem to get it right, we will then identify a menu of components we have distilled that holds the potential to enable girls’ sexual rights. Finally, we will argue that what is needed and possible for advancing young women’s sexual rights in the USA can be more transformational than a restricted set of implementations or even curricular tweaks. Ultimately, we suggest that these efforts can and must be anchored in a more imaginative ‘out of the box’ approach that goes far beyond constrained initiatives in overburdened schools: initiating, mobilising and supporting a social movement for girls’ sexual rights, led by and with young people, enabled and supported by adults who care about them.
