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Menstruation is a normal physiological process that occurs in adolescent girls, but it is often shrouded in taboo and stigma in Indian society. Socio-cultural norms and restrictions imposed by families and society can lead to ignorance and lack of access to accurate information and hygienic practices, which can negatively impact women’s physical and mental health throughout their lives. This study seeks to understand adolescent girls’ knowledge and awareness regarding menstruation, including their source of information, changes in their behavior and routine during their menstrual period, socio-cultural beliefs and norms they follow, and the impact of menstruation on their lives. This study was conducted in the state of Haryana, located in northwest India, in 2013. The sample consisted of 376 rural adolescent school-going girls. The study employed a mix-methods approach, using a self-administered structured close-ended questionnaire survey and semi-structured in-depth interviews as the data collection method. In order to enrich the study, additional data were collected through interviews with university-level girl students in 2016. And, further in 2022, during my PhD fieldwork, I got opportunity to discuss informally on the issue with the women in rural areas of the same region. The results found a lot of challenges for menstrual women which impact women’s physical and mental health. The enforcement of a lot of restrictions on the menstrual body makes them feel inferior and create hurdles in women’s growth and capabilities.

In Bangladesh, girls’ ability to complete schooling is compromised by poverty and the practice of early marriage. Although most girls enroll in school, rates of dropping out are high around puberty. This paper uses a panel survey (2001 and 2003) of nearly 3,000 adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh to predict schooling outcomes. The analysis explores household and community factors to explain school enrollment, dropping out and marriage. Girls in poor households are more likely to drop out before reaching secondary school. Girls in wealthier households are more likely to drop out later, because of marriage, and having more siblings increases this possibility.

Exploration of District Level Household Survey 4 data show that among the selected states, Karnataka, West Bengal, Meghalaya, Tripura, Telengana, Arunachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh show higher rates of school dropout of girls compared to the all India level. Using multilevel probit technique, the study shows that the incidence of school dropout of girls decreases if the first born of the parents is male and mother is more educated than father while it increases with lower asset endowment, land-holding and high spousal age-gap between parents. Further it is high among the Muslim religion and schedule caste category.

Girls’ access to education has improved in many of the world's developing countries. These countries are striving to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) requiring them to provide gender equality, promote the empowerment of women, and establish universal primary education (UPE) by 2015. The success of UPE in achieving gender equality in enrollment in those countries able to institute it is encouraging. Where previously girls trailed boys in their ability to access education due to parent inability or reluctance to pay the costs, they are now entering primary schools in comparable numbers (UNESCO, 1999, 2006).

The goal of this project is to link the analysis of gender construction to reproductive health, sexuality, and development within the postdisaster context of Nepal and thereby, inform our understandings of these linkages more broadly, as well as provide new opportunities for promoting gender equity, reproductive health, and development in areas of conflict or disaster.

Using life history narratives, I examine the intersections among reproductive health, gender, and sexuality before, during, and postdisaster.

These life history interviews shed light on how socialization processes shape and determine adolescent girls' future actions and women's life opportunities. At both the individual and state levels, issues related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health are exacerbated in times of crisis.

Life histories provide rich, thick descriptions of social life. However, they are limited in terms of reliability and making generalizations about larger populations. This chapter engages the reader, scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers in contemplating policy reform and initiation of context-based programs in times of natural disaster, political conflict, and other catastrophic events that disenfranchise those without agency and power.

This paper is unique in that it is the first to examine reproductive health and sexuality from the perspective of women living within a society bound by rigid gender and sexuality norms, but torn apart by natural disasters and the political and economic instability that follow in countries like Nepal.

Child immunization is widely recognized as a cost-effective preventive medicine. Unfortunately, in India about 50% of the eligible children aged 12–23 months miss some essential vaccination. Though a positive association between maternal education and markers of child health like immunization has been long established, the literature has struggled to find a causal relationship, mainly because education is inextricably correlated with other socioeconomic variables like income. In this chapter, I propose a new instrument for women’s education in India using the following facts. First, due to lack of sanitary facilities in schools, particularly rural schools, large number of girls drop out of school once they reach puberty. Second, age at menarche is largely determined by biological factors and not social factors. Together, age at menarche can explain variations in schooling, yet be independent of outcome variables like child immunization. I find that additional years of maternal schooling (conditional on strictly positive years of schooling) do increase the probability of complete immunization of children.

In this study, we examined the association between girls’ participation in high school sports and the physical activity, weight, body mass, and body composition of adolescent females during the 1970s when girls’ sports participation was dramatically increasing as a result of Title IX. We found that increases in girls’ participation in high school sports, a proxy for expanded athletic opportunities for adolescent females, were associated with an increase in physical activity and an improvement in weight and body mass among girls. In contrast, adolescent boys experienced a decline in physical activity and an increase in weight and body mass during the period when girls’ athletic opportunities were expanding. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that Title IX and the increase in athletic opportunities among adolescent females it engendered had a beneficial effect on the health of adolescent girls.

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

There is a growing recognition that social norms play a key role in perpetuating gender- and age-based violence, and that tackling social norms must be an integral component of prevention and response interventions to ensure meaningful progress towards the ambitious targets of eliminating gender-based violence (Sustainable Development Goal [SDG] Target 5.2) and violence against children (SDG 16.2) by 2030. However, existing research often fails to adequately capture life-course and context-specific complexities. To explore these challenges, this chapter focuses on adolescents’ vulnerabilities to violence in Afar, one of the Ethiopia’s most disadvantaged regions. Drawing on findings from the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) mixed-methods 2018 baseline research, and using a socio-ecological framework, the chapter highlights that while the patterning of violence experienced by adolescent girls and boys is shifting across generations at the micro-level, gender- and age-related social norms remain deeply entrenched in both migrating and settled pastoralist communities. At the meso-level, institutional barriers to addressing adolescents’ experiences of violence include a lack of basic infrastructure, a dearth of confidential reporting spaces, limited adolescent- and gender-friendly personnel within the police and justice sectors, and poor coordination. At the macro-level, the chapter underscores the significant disconnect between Ethiopia’s progressive national policies and adolescents’ experiences of violence, reflected in the availability and quality of prevention and response services. The chapter concludes that to adequately tailor services to local realities and tackle adolescents’ specific vulnerabilities, a fine-grained analysis of the gendered and generational experiences of violence in its diverse forms is critical.