Thank you for the floor. I am delivering this statement on behalf of Balance Promoción para el Desarrollo y Juventud from Mexico and Realizing sexual and reproductive justice alliance.
Your excellencies, our commitment to population, education and sustainable development requires us to address structural obstacles that hinder people’s access to quality education and transformative development. Comprehensive sexuality education is a crucial and meaningful intervention for the realization of the 2030 Agenda. We need to put agency, bodily autonomy and gender equality at the center of member states’ commitments, instead of watering down and avoiding the responsibilities that states have to improve our lives.
Comprehensive Sexuality Education is a human-rights-based framework that provides people with information, skills and tools to make informed and autonomous decisions, to enjoy sexuality and plan a future according to our desires and needs. CSE carries an integral approach that considers sexuality as a broad aspect of life, it includes physical, psychological, social and biological aspects that contribute to the personal, social and emotional development of people throughout our life course.
There are substantial evidence-based benefits to the implementation of CSE. We want to highlight that by ensuring access to accurate information, challenging gendered power imbalances, building up skills for decision-making, validating and prioritizing specific needs we are building agency and bodily autonomy for all.
Comprehensive sexuality education is crucial to the sustainability and wellbeing of communities since it promotes critical thinking, reflective dialogues among peers and a sense of belonging that evolves in agents-of-change working towards the improvement of their context.
Evidence shows that the discrimination of marginalized persons is rooted in lack of understanding of diversity. To this, CSE provides an opportunity to reduce the marginalization of persons based on varying identities including but not limited to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, ultimately contributing to an equitable and just society.
Protectionist approaches that disguise the truth about sexuality are doing a disservice to people’s autonomy. We need to address misinformation, CSE is about having evidence-based information on how our bodies work, an understanding of consent and about pleasure as a source of wellbeing. Providing it is crucial for people to build the ability to face reality with practical tools.
CSE stems off of our rights to education, to health, to equality, to access to information, the right to free development of one’s personality, and to live free of any form of discrimination. The full implementation of comprehensive sexuality education requires that we opt for long term strategies and sustained and progressive financial commitments that can effectively tackle structural barriers once and for all.
Thank you.