I'm Sarah Soysa, I have a social work background, and currently I'm reading for my Master's in Gender and Development Studies in the University of Melbourne. And I started actually volunteering with the Family Planning Association, and then I got so passionate about issues of young people, so currently, I'm representing Sri Lanka and South Asia in Asia Safe Abortion Partnership, FRIDA Young Feminist Fund, and Y-PEER Sri Lanka. It's a youth peer education network where we provide information and education on sexual and reproductive health and rights for young people. So my passion is about sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people and gender. According to WHO, the adolescent health group is from 10 to 19 years of age, and young people would be 15 to 29, but the problem that I find is when it comes to the definition of 15 to 29, there are unmarried young people and married young people. So when they access services, for married young people, it's easy to access services, and there's less stigma attached. But for unmarried, young people, they fall into the same category of young people, but when accessing information and services, it's quite hard for them to access like other married, young people. But when reports come out and when they talk about it, they say there's this much of young people accessing services and information, but in reality, it does some kind of an injustice for the unmarried, young people, so I want to mention about that. We don't have comprehensive sexuality location in the school curriculum, in the sense, we have a little bit of information and like one chapter on HIV and sexual and reproductive health and rights. But there's no proper training for teachers, no proper training for parents in the curriculum, and probably they just keep it over because of the cultural background and the norms. So they just probably skip over the part where sexual and reproductive health is included even for Biology students, it's mostly about the anatomy and very technical. It doesn't talk about referrals, it doesn't talk about sexual and reproductive health in a youth-friendly way. So because there is lack of comprehensive sexual education and because of the stigma under and the norms in Sri Lanka, young people do not tend to ask from their parents or elders like about sexual and reproductive health and rights related issues. Therefore, they use informal methods like the Internet or magazines or ask from peers. So this is where peer education comes into play, and I highly recommend peer education because then when you'll educate young peers about accurate information and services and proper referral systems, then they can talk to their peers, and that is a good method of flowing information and services. Talking about youth-friendly health services, there are youth-friendly health centers in national hospitals, but they are not active. There is nothing happening, because either the health service provider is an older person, or it is not quite youth-friendly, it's kind of scary to go inside, so young people do not like to. And there is no trend of young people going into these centers and accessing information or services, so that is a major problem. And as I've mentioned before, the age gap and the stigma which comes with the [INAUDIBLE] varies and the norms, that's also another issue that young people in Sri Lanka face. As I mentioned before, there is no proper training for teachers, parents, or even for pharmacist, and medical health service providers. So because of that, talking about pharmacists, so for example, a young person goes to buy a condom, but in the village setting, people probably know each other in Sri Lanka. It's not like in other countries. They know each other. They communicate to each other, so young people do not want to go and buy contraceptives, even if it is available and even if there's no objection from law. They still don't want to go and buy it because of the stigma. Looking at statistics, there are about 40,000 teenage pregnancies happening a year in Sri Lanka. And informal reports say that there are about 800 to 1,000 unsafe abortions happening in Sri Lanka for a day. If I talk about abortion a little bit, abortion is restricted in Sri Lanka, and it's only permitted if the mother's life is in danger. But still, there are about 1,000 unsafe abortions happening in Sri Lanka, and that's a huge number with a population of 20 million. So all that means young people have sex, and they need information, but the problem is they don't have accurate information and even about medical abortion. Medical abortion is a safe method, but they do not have information, they actually don't know, so they don't know to access it. So they have to go to back alley abortions centers, and these are expensive and could be risky, and there's no pre-counseling or anything. Post-abortion care and post-counseling is available, but most young people don't know about these things because they don't have access to youth-friendly health centers. There's no education, school curriculum, and there's no culture where parents or older people discuss about sexual reproductive issues. And she was like, virginity still prevails in Sri Lanka, and it creates a lot of stress and depression and anxiety and also violence among young people. And also talking about violence a little bit. I did my research on sexual violence against women in public transport, and it is quite rampant. That means three out of four women, statistically speaking, experience violence in public transportation. And there is a five-year imprisonment for that, but people do not know about this. There's is very less legal violence among young people, and even among general population on their rights and about violence. So they actually don't know if they experience violence or abuse, they do not know what to do. If they experience rape, they don't know what to do, where to go, and to whom they can complain about it to. And because of the embarrassment and the shame that's related to sex, they do not even talk to their adults about it. So there's a lot of child abuse going on as well. And because there is no comprehensive age appropriate sexuality education in Sri Lanka, lots of young kids face sexual abuse a lot because they simply do not know how to communicate about it. Parent's do not know how to talk to their children, about, maybe about good touch and bad touch, how to just give simple information like that, they do not even do that. Because they don't have the capacity, and there's no environment built on that, as in how to do that properly. Young people are the experts about young people. So they are the best group of people to talk about their rights and their needs and what they need. It's extremely important in all young people in advocacy and also in all respects, like planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and follow up, so it's extremely important. But what happens, is there's a lot of talk on Islam, just because requirements of the funders, or the government, or just because of the criteria, they just get young people into meetings, and they discuss blah, blah, blah. And then there´s no follow up, and it´s actually implemented properly. And what happens at the end is what is decided from the top, so it doesn't reach the grassroot level, so involving young people in advocacy is very much needed. And there is very less political parties of the men in Sri Lanka, specifically young women, so it's very much needed to include young women in politics, and to empower them to participate in political dialogues or political activities and take decisions over themselves. And discuss what issues they face and what kind of things they can do to solve the issues or either seek legal support. Good advocacy means young people being involved and them feeling responsible about themselves, their health, their issues, their rights. So in good advocacy, they would feel responsible, they would feel they are taken seriously. Their ideas and actual situations are actually included in the document, and for example, we can take the national youth policy in Sri Lanka. And then actually involve young people from different sectors and getting opinions and their ideas and their suggestions into the youth policy. So that policy so now what's left is to implement it properly and include young people in the implementation process as well. I just want to talk a little bit about funding for young people. When it comes to issues related to sex work, when it comes to issues related to safe abortion and talking about affected population, the homosexuality's criminalized in Sri Lanka, and safe abortion is restricted. And sex worker is neither legalized or not legal, the law is very vague related to sex work in Sri Lanka. So when it comes to addressing the issues, it's so difficult to address, because they are not identified as a group to access services, or that the government is obligated to provide services for them. So funding becomes very important. If a young group of people want to advocate for safe abortion, it's so difficult to get funding from any organization or the government because afraid to provide funding because they don't want to create an issue with the government, and the government would obviously not provide funding. Funding is very important for young people, and if global organizations and global institutions and any government or anyone who is interested in supporting young advocates, if they can focus on getting them more funding to do what they want it's because they are so creative, and they have a lot of ideas and. And they are the experts, so I think providing funding for advocacy for young people is very necessary. If I talk about an example or a good practice that we had in Sri Lanka, we actually started working with the Young Women's Christian Association. And we trained young women around the country, including the north and east, on sexual and reproductive health and rights and violence against women and HIV and related topics. What I find interesting, actually talking about north and east, there are lots of issues prevailing still. There's malnutrition going on in the north and east, and not like in other parts of the country and access to education, service and technology. They still have a lot of issues related to violence and psychological trauma. So we actually could touch up on these young women from the north and east, those areas. And we actually first trained them on sexual and reproductive health and rights. And at the same time, we called their parents and gatekeepers of the area like important people in the area like the lawyers, principals of schools involved with the session and for sensitize them. Because most of the time when it comes to education, sexual and reproductive health, what happens is we train people and they go back to their community, and they face a lot of obstacles and issues from their parents or their boyfriends or their partners, and then it just stops. So we want to just sensitize the parents and the gatekeepers in the area first and then involve young women and train them, because then when they go back to their community, they receive support from their parents and their community leaders. So from this what we got out was, a couple of young women actually wanted to stand for elections in areas in the north and east specifically, and involve in political dialogues. And they were a part of a couple of we had, they were part of the virtual conference on post 2015 agenda. Some of them actually got the opportunity to go in front of media and visual media and talk about violence in their areas. So these were good achievements. And getting religious readers on board is very important, and getting their support because they have a measured influence in a country like Sri Lanka, talking about safe abortion or talking about young people's sexuality reproductive health and rights. So getting them onboard is very important. So I see this as a successful advocacy afoot.
