Vulnerable youth or vulnerabilising contexts? A critical review of youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) policies in Eastern and Southern Africa

Lynch, Ingrid, Macleod, Catriona Ida, Chiweshe, Malvern Tatenda and Moore, Sarah-Ann (2024) Vulnerable youth or vulnerabilising contexts? A critical review of youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) policies in Eastern and Southern Africa. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. ISSN 1868-9884

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Abstract

Introduction Policy decisions about young people’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) have far-reaching implications for their well-being. Few SRHR policies, however, focus specifically on youth. Rather, youth SRHR tends to be subsumed within national policies of Health, Youth, Education and Development Ministries, particularly in the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) region, complicating an assessment of the overall state of youth SRHR policies. Given the fact that youth SRHR policies focus on a particular segment of the population—youth, teenagers or adolescents—how policies depict these subjects has implications for how policy objectives, programmes and interventions are conceptualised and the kind of sexual and reproductive health concerns that are prioritised. Methods Using a subject positioning lens, our critical review of youth SRHR policy in force between 2010 and 2020 spans policy domains to examine depictions of young people across 88 ESA policy documents. Our analysis aimed to identify the qualities and responsibilities associated with different youth subject positions and the broader implications thereof for young people’s SRHR. Results We identify two dominant youth subject positions—risky youth and youth-at-risk—both of which construct risk as inherent to young people, overwhelmingly emphasise negative repercussions of youth sexual practices, foreground individualised interventions and hold young people responsible for preventing negative sexual and reproductive health (SRH) outcomes in the absence of policy objectives that meaningfully address structural constraints on their agency. Conclusions Considering the dominance of public health research underpinning youth SRHR, our findings contribute a much-needed critical social theory complement that supports holistic, justice-oriented and contextually embedded policy responses to young people’s SRHR. Policy Implications Based on our findings, we provide policy recommendations that support a conceptual shift away from vulnerable youth to vulnerabilising contexts, such that young people’s vulnerability to adverse SRH outcomes is situated in the enabling and constraining conditions in which they live their lives.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Date Deposited:	19 Sep 2024 14:30
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2024 00:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125467

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