4 September is celebrated globally as World Sexual Health Day, an awareness day that promotes global advocacy to promote the best practices in sexual health.
Sexual health is about caring for ourselves and each other, and celebrating our bodies’ capacities, including the capacity for pleasure. It’s about relationships built upon mutual trust and respect, and creating a place of safety from which we can express ourselves, explore and connect with others.
This year’s theme for WSHD ‘Let’s Talk Pleasure’, which identifies the role of sexual pleasure in overall sexual health and well-being.
Sexual health is a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being related to sexuality, not just the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity, the WAS website states. It requires a “positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships,” as well as the possibility of experiencing pleasure, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.
Here are the 16 WAS rights to Sexual Health:
1. The right to equality and non-discrimination
2. The right to life, liberty, and security of the person
3. The right to autonomy and bodily integrity
4. The right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
5. The right to be free from all forms of violence and coercion
6. The right to privacy
7. The right to the highest attainable standard of health, including sexual health; with the possibility of pleasurable, satisfying, and safe sexual experiences
8. The right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its application
9. The right to information
10. The right to education and the right to comprehensive sexuality education
11. The right to enter, form, and dissolve marriage and other similar types of relationships based on equality and full and free consent
12. The right to decide whether to have children, the number and spacing of children, and to have the information and the means to do so
13. The right to the freedom of thought, opinion, and expression
14. The right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly
15. The right to participation in public and political life
16. The right to access to justice, remedies, and redress
Sexual health is inseparable from the full enjoyment of human rights, including every person’s right to bodily autonomy according to UNFPA.
We will also be celebrating World Sexual Health Week 12 – 18 September. Be on the look out for activities to be able to participate.
For those requiring more information or would like access to sexual health services, pay us a visit at the Matrix offices and/or contact us on our social media pages and we may be able to assist you.