Have You Seen My Rights? – Young peoples right to talk about Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

The Sustainable Development Goals have been adopted and now is the time for implementation! We, young people, are a crucial part of implementing these goals through our action at the national level to support young people’s rights to sexual health.

In Sweden, we collaborated with YouAct and the Swedish Association of Sexual Education (RFSU) to create two key activities, a workshop and a breakfast-seminar. The workshop focused on reaching out to young people with information and knowledge about the SDGs. We discussed how young people have been instrumental in influencing the goals and how we want to continue this work in the implementation process. Based on three of the five pledges from HYSMR, we talked about what needs to be done in Sweden to improve comprehensive sexual education and youth-friendly health services. We also discussed how Sweden can be a global leader in youth and adolescent health and rights. A significant opinion raised in the workshop was the importance of having a norm-critical perspective. Health care providers, teachers, politicians etc. should be educated and trained to take a norm-critical view to promote more inclusive health care and education. The visions of the workshop youth participants were based on goals to achieve by 2030 and included: all youth-friendly services will have a LGBTQIA- certificate; subsidized birth control options will be available to all young people in Sweden and health care will be equal for all young people.

The seminar was a good way for young persons, politicians, representatives from civil society and experts on SRHR to meet and discuss how young people can participate in a meaningful way in the implementation of the SDGs. They discussed the different potential options and forms of collaboration between different actors. The suggestions included: creation of a SRHR platform for organizing different actors from civil society and politicians to work together in the implementation, awareness raising and knowledge distribution of SGDs within organizations and political parties; young people getting opportunities to be part of references groups who can work with the implementation of the goals.

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