Challenging criminalisation of young people’s bodily autonomy: Conversations on non-punitive approaches to gender-based violence

In the contexts of South Asia, young people are systematically prevented from making fully informed decisions about their bodies, their sexuality, and their rights. The moral panic surrounding protecting young people’s perceived ‘innocence’ from a real or perceived ‘sexual threat’ has generated increasingly harsher legal limitations on their sexual expression and assertion of sexual agency, desire and rights related to bodily autonomy. In response, some child rights’ groups, women’s rights groups, feminist scholars and lawyers are raising concerns about how increasingly punitive approaches to addressing gender-based harms and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) violations faced by young people may have a collateral impact on their right to bodily autonomy. These restrictive and often punitive measures are generally promoted as protective, and in some cases, they are legitimately so. In our analysis, they also may amount to ‘protectionism’, a form of penalisation that, in effect, criminalises’ young peoples’ exploration of their gender, sexuality, bodies and pleasure. Protectionist approaches are often ideologically driven and based on paternalistic assumptions about young peoples’ (and especially girls’ and young women’s) capacity and ability, with the pretence of protecting those defined as ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ as if these are inherent to the individual rather than structurally and socially constituted. It is this penalisation and alternatives to it that we explore here.