Bridging Science, Policies and Politics in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

As a trained gynaecologist with more than twenty years of service in Africa and other resource-poor settings, I have seen first hand the urgent need to expand access to sexual and reproductive health services. In 1994, I founded the International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICRH) in Ghent, Belgium and Kenya to respond to the devastating impacts of HIV and AIDS. As a multidisciplinary centre of excellence, we have been tackling the mutually interdependent challenges of preventing HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, improving maternal and child health, reducing sexual and gender-based violence, and supporting the fight for better sexual and reproductive health. The Greentree Meeting and White Paper on the Role of Sexual Violence and Genito-anal Injury in HIV Transmission, Acquisition and Pathogenesis and the review papers in this collection underscore the need for aligning sexual violence and HIV prevention and reflect the kind of achievements that are possible through interdisciplinary and international collaborations. The White Paper identifies important gaps in our understanding about the basic science of sexually transmitted HIV and the crucial importance of understanding the interaction among physical and psycho-social risk factors that are specific to gender, sex and age. As a Senator in the Belgian Parliament, I saw the necessity of addressing these issues, simultaneously, through research, clinical interventions and policy. Comprehensive approaches are needed to bring together medical and psychosocial care, legal counselling, HIV prevention, care and treatment, and to ensure systematic monitoring, reporting and evaluation. We must do better in generating the evidencebased outcomes that are needed to inform public health approaches that combat the barriers preventing survivors of sexualand gender-based violence from seeking treatment and care. The Greentree Meeting’s focus on the particular vulnerability and susceptibility of young adolescent women is critically important. Advancing this agenda will require new clinical protocols, new areas for data collection and new collaborations among basic scientists, clinicians, social scientists and policy makers. As I begin my tenure as the new Director of the Department of Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organization, this will be among my early priorities. I look forward to contributing to this global effort from this new perspective. Marleen Temmerman Department of Reproductive Health and Research, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland