Home > Human Rights Toolkit > A Call for Inclusion >
Young Women’s Access To Health Care

While we recognize that women (women of different ages, racial backgrounds, ethnicities and income groups) around the world have inadequate access to quality health care, we believe that the obstacles that young women face and their consequences are different because of their age and status in society.

Obstacles

• Confidentiality: The issue of confidentiality plays a profound role in young women’s ability or desire to access health care. When health care practitioners share medical and personal information with a young woman’s parent, guardian or community members without her consent, she may be increasingly reluctant to access care.
• Negative Expectations: Young women’s access to health care is compromised by the negative expectations of health care providers regarding their sexual behavior. When health care providers lecture young women on their perceived behavior rather than provide them with information necessary to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), substance abuse and violence, these young women will not return for follow-up services and will tell other young women not to access those services.
• Knowledge of Services: The way in which health care services are advertised to young women affects their utilization of these services. While this is an issue for women generally and poor people more broadly, few outreach plans are based on the recognition that young people access health care services for different reasons than adults do. For example, in the U.S. many young women will get medical care at their school, where such services are available, instead of going to a community-based health clinic either because they do not know it exists or they are worried about confidentiality issues.
• Physical Activity: Young women have relatively restricted access to recreational activities compared to young men. Inhibiting young women’s access to recreation, physical games and sports negatively affects their physical, mental and social well being.
• Social and Cultural Practices: Young women’s access to health care is also impacted by cultural practices regarding consent, marriage and sexuality. Young women are at a very young age expected to take on adult responsibilities like work and care for younger siblings while simultaneously they are treated like children when it comes to making decisions about their own health and bodies. In addition, although formal laws on consent are not always written, some young women are unable to access reproductive health care services because of a real fear of violence or because health care practitioners assume that a young woman’s guardian should be included in all health care decisions.
• Health Care Reform: Health care reforms such as the privatization of the health care system in some industrialized countries and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in some economically developing countries have had an adverse affect on women, especially women living in poverty. Young women are specifically affected because of gender and age expectations and their status in society. These structural changes are compounded by young women’s status in society and expectations regarding gender and age, to create a burden on young women that makes it very difficult for them to access preventative reproductive and general health care. Without this access, larger populations of young women are at a much higher risk of developing more severe and costly medical problems in the future.

Case Study: Street Survival Project (Center for Young Women’s Development)

The Street Survival Project of the Center for Young Women’s Development employs young women under 18 years old as community health outreach workers to provide peer education for young women on the streets in two neighborhoods in San Francisco, California. In 1994, with a small grant, a PhD student hired four young women to do a survey in two low-income communities on the health and support services that were available for young women. After discovering that the communities’ needs were not being met, the Center for Young Women’s Development was created as a way to provide young women with leadership opportunities and to pay them to do outreach to other young women. Today, as a project of an organization that is run solely by young women under 20 years old, the Street Survival Project employs four young women as community health outreach workers who provide information on sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, harm reduction, drugs, pregnancy and youth rights four days a week to young women on the streets of San Francisco. Because the outreach workers have the responsibility for deciding what supplies to take into the community, which area they will work in, and who joins the staff, they have a real leadership position within the organization.

The Center for Young Women’s Development has had a profound impact both on the past and present staff members as well as the young women who have received vital information and health-related services. Over the last five years, seventy-two young women have been hired as outreach workers, nine of whom had been incarcerated at one time. Stephanie Dunlop, the Director of the Street Survival Project commented that working for the Center provides you with a sense of confidence, stability and self-love that enables you to be a leader and know your value. To measure the impact that the project has had on young women in the community, the outreach workers conduct street surveys twice a year. The surveys consistently show that young women who interacted with the outreach workers learn information about their health and ways to protect themselves that they would not have otherwise received.

For more information contact the Center for Young Women’s Development, at (415) 703-8800.

Next: Promotion of Young Women’s Health

top