“The Medical System Is Not Built for Black [Women’s] Bodies”: Qualitative Insights from Young Black Women in the Greater Toronto Area on Their Sexual Health Care Needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While often framed as historical or ‘post’colonial, the pervasive legacies of anti-Black racism, rooted in the afterlives of slavery and the dehumanization of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) voices, continues to shape the health experiences of young ACB women in Ontario, Canada. Using an intersectional framework, this qualitative study utilized focus groups (n = 24) to understand factors influencing access to sexual and reproductive health services for young ACB women in southern Ontario. The findings reveal that fostering ACB youth engagement in the design and facilitation of healthcare programs will be vital for creating more responsive spaces to fully express sexual health concerns. It also demonstrates that Eurocentric biomedical frameworks continue to obscure young ACB women’s needs, emphasizing the necessity for culturally relevant care. Lastly, the findings indicate that internalized colonial narratives around health practices perpetuate intergenerationally, further complicating young ACB women’s access to adequate sexual and reproductive healthcare. This examination illuminates the need to address the colonial legacies within healthcare systems that continue to pathologize and hypersexualize young ACB women’s bodies. The study concludes by advocating for intersectional, youth-centered, and culturally competent approaches to dismantling the barriers young ACB women face in accessing sexual and reproductive health services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".