Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Sexual and Reproductive Health among Parents, Guardians & Teachers: A Contextual Study

One of the main objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals is to improve the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of adolescent girls (SDGs). Adolescent girls’ SRH, maternal health, and child health could be impacted by not having adequate and accurate knowledge, a positive attitude, safe behaviour, and regular practice.

With 36 million adolescents, Bangladesh has a sizeable teenage population, making up more than one-fifth of the country’s overall population. Of the population of adolescents, there are approximately 49% girls, according to the 2011 census. According to population forecasts, its population will keep growing for at least 2 to 3 coming decades.

The sexual and reproductive health (SRH) status of the teenage population in Bangladesh, including both married and unmarried individuals, continues to be a major source of worry. In Bangladesh, many young people—especially young women—do not have access to enough opportunities to improve their general health as they mature. When it comes to making wise decisions in life, they start to face enormous obstacles, such as the fact that many adolescents engage in unsafe or undesirable sexual practises without receiving timely or adequate care. Due to Bangladesh’s patriarchal social norms, these problems have led to a high frequency of underage marriages, teenage pregnancies, domestic violence, an increase in sexual exploitation, and increased dropout rates.

Despite Bangladesh’s 18-year-old legal minimum age for marriage, a significant number of unions nonetheless occurred before this. With a median age of 16.1 years at the time of the first marriage for women, the rate of child marriage is still among the highest in the world. In the country with the highest adolescent fertility rate, there are 113 live births per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 19; 31% of married teens between those ages are either already moms or expecting their first child, and nearly 70% give birth before turning 20. Adolescent females also frequently experience various types of abuse, such as physical violence, sexual exploitation, and verbal and emotional abuse.

For unmarried teenagers, especially girls, SRH information and services are severely lacking because it is still considered taboo in Bangladeshi culture, leaving them open to health risks and receiving unequal treatment. Schools only offer a scant amount of information on SRH, and parents do not feel comfortable discussing SRH issues with their adolescent children. Adolescent guys likewise experience comparable cultural and educational limitations. They get puzzled, afraid, interested, and thrilled about SRH because they lack sufficient understanding and pertinent information, which also leads them to sleeplessness and generates a lot of concerns in their minds. Teenage guys seek assistance from their family members to deal with these issues, but ironically, no one offers assistance or even displays sufficient empathy to answer their questions.

Reproductive health in Bangladesh still mostly focuses on issues that affect women. Few SRH programmes target men to assist them in providing better care for their partners, thus worsening the SRH situation for older teenage girls, particularly for married girls in Bangladesh. However, Bangladesh lacks nationally representative data that assess the extent of teenage populations’ SRH knowledge, attitudes, and practises (KAP). The BDHS (2014), which solely highlights ever-married adolescents’ knowledge of HIV/AIDS, reports that just 12% of ever-married adolescents had comprehensive knowledge in this regard, which is more indicative of adolescents’ limited familiarity with SRH concerns. Negative SRH effects are frequently associated with a lack of knowledge brought on by erroneous information.

Parents in Bangladesh have historically believed that pubertal changes, including menstruation, are a normal stage of human development that should be kept a secret from teenagers before they undergo physical and psychological changes. Most teenage girls may not know about menstruation because moms typically believe that knowledge about sexual health may encourage adolescents to engage in sexual activity. However, because they were uninformed of SRH prior to seeing the rapid development of significant hormonal changes, teenagers may experience fear, depression, and anxiety. The majority of older adolescent girls saw their mothers as their primary sources of information regarding SRH issues. Additionally, mothers were the main sources of knowledge on SRH. because of the uniformity of gender, daughters have a trustworthy relationship with their mothers.

Teenage girls are encouraged to keep quiet and develop a sense of shame about concerns relating to their sexual and reproductive health as a result of the traditional patriarchal society’s interest in promoting long-standing superstitions and little to no understanding. Parents are reluctant to discuss SRHR problems. In fact, very few parents recognise the value of discussing these matters with their adolescent children. Parents are unable to support or help their children who have SRHR concerns because they fear being stigmatised. Due to their own lack of orientation to sexual and reproductive health rights, parents, teachers, and other elders frequently fail to assist their adolescent daughters in need.

Numerous study results indicate that there are girls who understand the value of protection from discrimination, violence against women and girls (VAWG), STDs, and privacy associated with SRH. They hardly ever link these challenges to the rights to sexual and reproductive health, though. Again, several respondents believed they knew nothing about sexual and reproductive health rights, but when questioned privately during in-depth interviews or given hints during focus groups, they revealed their knowledge.

Adolescents have very little access to information about their sexuality and orientation when they reach puberty due to rigid social norms, stigma against sex education, and religious superstitions. Researchers & practitioners should concentrate primarily on dispelling myths regarding the synchronisation of SRHR-related issues in the context of Bangladesh and spread the knowledge and outcomes among parents, guardians and teachers.

Sources:

1. Zakaria, M.; Karim, F.; Mazumder, S.; Cheng, F.; Xu, J. (2020). Knowledge on, Attitude towards, and Practice of Sexual and Reproductive Health among Older Adolescent Girls in Bangladesh: An Institution-Based Cross-Sectional Study. International journal of environmental research and public health.
2. Das, A.; Roy, S. (2016). Unheard Narrativesof Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights(SRHR) of Adolescent Girls of the Holy Cross College, Dhaka, Bangladesh.