Introduction: contextualising “rights” in sexual and reproductive health

The idea for this supplement arose from discussions among a set of research partners associated with the Realising Rights Research Programme Consortium (RR RPC), an international partnership funded by the UK Department for International Development from 200510 that focused on neglected areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) [1]. In the Consortium, work on rights has been concerned with ways of bridging the gap between international legal human rights frameworks as applied to SRHR, and how these play out for actual people ‘on the ground’. We noted that there was a well-developed international language of human rights in relation to sexual and reproductive health, accompanied by significant international advocacy efforts stretching back several decades [2-4]. However, SRHR remained controversial and contested; sexual rights in particular are poorly understood by many policy actors, they are not easy to operationalise ‘downstream’ in policies and programmes, and their place and relevance in people’s day to day lives have been much less explored [5-7]. The papers in this volume are one contribution to the task of laying out why it is important to fill this gap and what the analytical challenges are in doing so. We decided, therefore, to focus our thematic work on rights on the challenges of contextualising and operationalising the concept in different local and national domains. The aim was to start from the perspective of lived experience, rather than from an abstract, universal concept of rights. This perspective reflects our thinking and discussions about rights in terms of grounded and localised understandings. These suggest the need to go beyond the concept of the abstract legal individual around which much human rights thinking is framed [3,8,9]. For the most part, SRHR literature falls into three broad categories: conceptual and analytical exploration of what rights to health are and how they are constructed [10-13]; rights-based approaches in policy and programmes [14-16]; and advocacy focused pieces for specific areas of rights, e.g. rights of People Living with HIV and AIDS [17,18]. These approaches have greatly enhanced our understanding of the relationship between SRH and rights, yet we still know remarkably little about the relevance of “rights” in people’s everyday lives. There is currently not very much literature which addresses this question in different contexts. This collection seeks to begin filling the gap by analysing the lived experiences of SRHR from diverse groups of women and men from Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa and more globally. Authors in this collection draw on the rich range of analyses of rights and responsibilities, noted in the previous paragraph. They also draw on the work of a number of African researchers who have drawn attention to disjunctions between the language of legal individualism coming from western jurisprudence and the more collective notions of self and personhood which characterise other societies [19,20]. These include anthropological or ethnographic accounts which draw attention to contextually specific articulations of human entitlements [21]. In many contexts, the language of rights is not necessarily how people frame their understandings of reproductive and sexual wellbeing or their sense of entitlement to it. However, we know much less about alternative framings of reproductive health, sexuality and wellbeing that do not take rights as their starting point and how they intersect with different dimensions of well/illbeing, such as poverty, stigma and discrimination. Yet they are critical from the perspective of interventions through public health, law and social policy. At the same time, the international discourse of human rights has been profoundly influential in policy making and programming for SRH and has permeated national and local debates and practice in many places. The interplay between these discourses, debates and * Correspondence: [email protected] Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, BN1 9RE, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Standing et al. BMC International Health and Human Rights 2011, 11(Suppl 3):S1 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-698X/11/S3/S1