News

 The PACT, a collaboration across 25 youth-led and youth-serving organisations, with support from UNAIDS, has launched a parental consent survey for young people (under 30) to gather their opinions on how parental consent laws impact their access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and harm reduction services and, importantly, collect information on their first-hand experiences.

One of the five goals underlined in the framework of the PACT is to eliminate the legal and policy barriers that young people face in accessing SRH and harm reduction services across the world, starting with parental consent requirements.  Parental consent requirements require young people under a certain age to have a parent’s or a guardian’s consent before they can access certain health services. Sometimes these laws are applied only in relation to certain SRH or harm reduction services.

The survey is available in Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and English and can be found here.

Please circulate this survey widely to civil society, youth networks, friends, family members and colleagues around the world; our goal is get over 2,000 responses to the survey by mid-June. The results of the survey will be presented at AIDS 2014 in Melbourne to facilitate dialogues with young people on how they can take action to change parental consent laws in their own country.

For questions about this survey, please contact focal points of the PACT:

Kat Watson (kawatson@ippf.org), Aram Barra (aram.barra@espolea.org), Thaw Zin Aye (thaw@youth-lead.org) and/or Anita Krug (anita@youthrise.org).