CAIRO: Youth in the Middle East and North Africa region are physically ready to initiate sexual activity but often lack the information and services needed to protect their sexual and reproductive health, a recent report concluded.
The report, titled “Facts of Life: Youth Sexuality and Reproductive Health in the Middle East and North Africa,” was released by the Population Reference Bureau and conducted by Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi, program director at the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Population Reference Bureau, and Shereen El Feki, a writer, broadcaster, academic, and vice chair of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, representing the Arab region.
It stated that while international agreements provide frameworks for defining and addressing young people’s sexual and reproductive health needs in the MENA region, policies addressing young people’s sexual and reproductive health are still in their infancy.
“The extent to which youth achieve their full potential depends on how well governments and civil societies adapt to meet young people’s needs, including their sexual and reproductive health,” read the report.
The report researches the age group defined as ‘youth,’ these are the one in five people living MENA region between the ages of 15 and 24 who counted for nearly 90 million in 2010.
The report referenced numerous studies, however noting that these studies are illuminating to policymakers, academics, activists, and others seeking information about young people’s sexual lives, but they are also isolated, making it difficult to generalize about regional trends.
The report said that MENA’s youth population is both large and diverse and experiencing changes. For example, early marriage is not as common as young people stay in school longer, but many face limited job prospects and a high cost of living, which drives up the age of marriage.
Consequently, as an increasing number of young men and women delay marriage, new sexual norms and forms of marriage are emerging, such as urfi marriage in Egypt and other parts of the region. These marriages are undertaken to avoid the difficulties of a standard marriage and to give sexual relationships some Islamic legitimacy.
Furthermore, young people in the region receive little education on sexual and reproductive health issues, relying largely on their peers for information and because of social disapproval of sexual relations outside of marriage, survey data on young people’s sexual activity are limited.
Roudi-Fahimi and El Feki have drawn a number of conclusions; young people in the MENA region are mainly “in the dark about sexual and reproductive health.” Access to sexual information and sexual health services remains limited for young people across the region, as reflected by low levels of accurate knowledge, even where self- declared satisfaction is high, and the low use of contraception, including condoms.
Although survey data are scarce for most countries in the region, the consequences of this lack of knowledge are apparent in undiagnosed sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, abortion and out-of-wedlock births, the report stated.
The second conclusion made in the report is that gender, rather than rural-urban residence, makes the difference regarding sexual information. Due to an array of physical and social restrictions placed on young women to ensure that they do not have intercourse and thus present an intact hymen upon marriage and to meet this expectation, some young women may engage in hymen repair or anal sex, exposing them to substantial health risks.
Girls and young women across the region generally have less information than young men about sex, less ability to speak about it, less negotiating power to protect themselves in the event of unplanned sexual relations, and less chance of remedying the consequences, stated the report.
The third conclusion about sexuality in the MENA region is that “sexual activity can be risky.” A significant proportion of young men, and some young women, are engaged in some form of transactional sex, which the report defines as sex in exchange for money or gifts, either by choice or coercion. However, the writers of the report say that “to better serve these young people, more research is needed on both the providers and clients of such part-time prostitution,” adding that more work is also needed to understand the risk factors associated with unsafe sex, including substance use.
The final conclusion the report draws is that “sexual harassment is common” around the region. In Lebanon, sexual harassment was reported by just under 20 percent of male students, and just over 15 percent of their female peers, while in Egypt, more than 60 percent of young women aged 10–29 in urban areas say they have been sexually harassed, mainly in the form of verbal abuse by strangers; around half of those experiencing harassment kept it to themselves.
