Zizi sexuel l'expo!

Since October, there has been an exhibition running at the Cité des Sciences intended to help pre-teens understand sexuality. It has been adapted from the book, Le guide du zizi sexuel by Zep and Hélène Bruller and is fun as well as educational. And fairly explicit.

I can imagine the outcry if there were a similar exhibition in London, but when you read any of the several reports about the teenage pregnancy rate in the UK not meeting the hoped-for targets, something must be done. According to the BBC report, the rate in the UK has fallen by 11% but it was hoped that it would be cut by 50% by 2010. The rate is three times that of France, so perhaps we could learn some lessons.

Intriguingly, the website for the exhibition in Paris, is also available in English. It runs until January 2009.

Empowering women: Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Sudan

SWEEP, the Swazi Women's Economic Empowerment Project, has been working to enable to profit from their change of status in law. Until last year they could neither own property or open a bank account.

The programme has helped in the formation of 32 co-operatives with 47,000 beneficiaries. They give instruction to the women on how to set up a group and how to develop an enterprise.

The projects themselves are thought up and funded by the women themselves, anything from handicrafts, through animal rearing, to growing herbs. The aim is to free women from abusive situations, and from grinding poverty.


In Sierra Leone, new laws have been passed to ban forced marriages and abuse against wives, and to allow women to inherit property.

The law for registration of customary marriage states that both parties must be over 18 and both must give their consent.

The act banning domestic abuse has very broad definitions of violence: "physical or sexual abuse, economic abuse, emotional, verbal or psychological abuse, harassment, conduct that harms, endangers the safety, health or well-being of another person or undermines the privacy and dignity of another person".

The inheritance of property means that women, whose husbands have died, will not be left destitute by members of the extended family making claims on his property.


In Sudan, the Girls' Education Movement has been set up in an effort to combat the teenage pregnancy rate which is linked to the high drop-out rate of girls from education. It is a peer-to-peer group to encourage children and their parents to go to school. The longer girls stay at school, the more they are able to make informed decision and the less likely they are to become pregnant.

In addition, the government has brought in a policy of free education. This on its own may account for the increase in enrolment for girls from 17% to 37%.

Teenage pregnancy

I spent what felt like years, but was probably only two plus several bits, studying part-time for a further degree in health psychology. It was very relevant to the job I was doing at the time and it's a subject that fascinates me.

One particular aspect which interests me is reproductive health so when I spotted two blogs, first The Well-Timed Period: Who Doesn't Use Birth Control and then figleaf (note: adult content with some very thought provoking posts), had picked up on a BBC report “Teenage pregnancy myth dismissed” - I delved a bit further. So far in fact that I ended up emailing the authors and they very kindly sent me a copy of the original paper.

The main finding is that “older women” are as irresponsible as teenagers about contraception, with around 50% not having used contraceptives at all. I’m not disputing their findings an any way – far from it. It’s just that I would have liked more information. I think there probably is quite a lot more to be tweaked out of the data.

I have difficulty in understanding why the researchers made a division of the population into teenagers and not-teenagers. What happens when they are 20? Are they expected to change their attitudes suddenly? I don’t know why they did that, and especially when you see that the mean age of the so-called older women was 28. There must have been a much greater number in their twenties than in their thirties or forties (the range was 20 – 46). It would have been interesting to see those age groups separately, if not the raw data. It might show more in the way of trends.

Given that teenagers were expected to be more irresponsible, and that there have been a number of government initiatives since 1999 trying to combat teenage pregnancies, it could be the sex education has worked to some extent. Teenagers are now no worse than other age groups.

The results are dire however. I have to say in the case of this research and where it was carried out, social problems will have had a very large influence. It is an area of high unemployment, overcrowded housing, and so on.