This Sexual Health Week, Eve’s Programmes Manager, Asmita, who has led on our first ever school’s gynae health education programme, called Know Your Body, blogs about how we can break down the barriers faced by minoritised groups when accessing health education.
At The Eve Appeal, our core mission is to prevent or early diagnosis as many cases of gynaecological cancer as possible. We do this by funding life-saving research into and raising awareness of the five gynae cancers: womb, ovarian, cervical, vulval and vaginal. It’s clear that early diagnosis starts with health education at a young age, so that children grow up knowing their body and not picking up shame or embarrassment when it comes to talking about it. This way, when something goes wrong later in life and they need to be checked by a doctor, they can accurately describe their symptoms and where they are to a healthcare professional. Yet, our research found that half of the women couldn’t correctly label a diagram of the gynaecological anatomy.
This lack of awareness of the gynae anatomy is often linked with a lack of engagement with health services. This negatively effects people’s health outcomes, particularly for minority groups. This is reflected in the unfortunate reality that generally south Asian women have worse outcomes when diagnosed with a gynae cancer than White women in the UK. There are many reasons which contribute to this, such as: language barriers, taboos around conversations about bodies and ‘private parts’, lack of awareness about medical procedures and options like the cervical screening and the HPV vaccine.
There are other reasons too, like the mistrust of medical and health services within refugee communities and the fear of being reported to immigration authorities, systemic racism and legacies of oppression from health services, such as the non-consensual testing of penicillin on Black men, the lumping of minorities together into one homogenous other and inadequacies of the health, social care and charity sectors in understanding cultural contexts of diverse communities when reaching out to them. These are just some of the barriers in engagement to health education and health services.
Sometimes the language used in conversations about barriers puts the emphasis on the individuals who don’t engage with services and imply they are to blame, for example the term ‘hard to reach groups’ puts the focus on the groups rather than the services, who are the ones failing to reach them. A more constructive approach is letting the history of oppression and systemic racism inform health information and service design when aiming to reach under-served groups. To engage better, we need to design services and resources that reflect their realities and speak to them.
When developing our new school’s gynae health education programme, called Know Your Body, we were lucky to work with incredible grassroots organisations like Decolonising Contraception, Naz and Shine Aloud UK, who work directly with people who often fall through the cracks in our health services.
People with lived experience of gynaecological cancer are at the heart of everything we do at Eve. As we move into education for young people with the greatest barriers to healthcare access, we’ve found it really important to reflect on the barriers our target audience face, learning from research, previous resources, experts, grassroots organisations and direct feedback from young people. With Know Your Body we set out to create accurate education resources to empower young people to look after their health throughout their lifetime, that are easy to use for teachers (who may not know much about gynae health) and are representative of diverse young people.
In the Sex Education Forum’s survey of over a 1,000 young people
35%
just over 1 in 3 (35%) rated the quality of their school RSE as ‘good’ or ‘very good’
22%
more than 1 one in 5 (22%) rated the quality of RSE as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’
The Know Your Body lesson plans aim to plug the gaps in RSHE for young people: knowing what’s normal for you, spotting when things aren’t and knowing when to seek help.
In Know Your Body, we’ve our instilled cancer-prevention focused health education in age-appropriate curriculum that builds up over the years for 5-13 year old’s. Our goals and our approach remain the same: prevention and early diagnosis, and letting the unique realities of our target demographics, young people in this case, guide us at all steps. Through Know Your Body we want to educate and empower children so they know their body and feel comfortable and confident talking about it if they need to seek help. We’re positive that this will plug the gap in engaging, high-quality cancer-prevention education.
