Sexuality and social change: making the connection. Strategies for action and investment.

Sexuality is an integral part of the human experience--a complex phenomenon with physical emotional intellectual social and spiritual dimensions. While deeply personal sexuality occurs within specific social economic cultural political and religious contexts. Those contexts in turn profoundly shape the possibilities and limitations of an individuals sexual experience and with that many other aspects of the individuals life. At the same time evolving expressions of sexuality by individuals and groups influence culture politics and religion. Sexuality is both central to some of the greatest problems of our time and at the core of human well-being for people of all ages. A cultures treatment of sexuality can influence whether an individual is safe or unsafe; ill or healthy; rich or poor; educated or not; employed or enslaved; treated with justice or with contempt. Sexuality plays a crucial role in determining womens social status which in turn affects the number of women children and families living in poverty. It influences a womans ability to protect herself against violence disease and unwanted pregnancy; to survive pregnancy and childbirth; and to manage her fertility. Sex can be an arena for contested power relations and result in debilitating discrimination abuse and violence based on gender and sexual orientation. Sex can also be a means for transmitting devastating diseases as evidenced by extraordinary rates of morbidity and mortality from sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS. Young people today as in past generations are particularly vulnerable to the risks of unintended pregnancy unsafe abortion maternal mortality violence and sexual exploitation. (excerpt)