AIDS lays bare the injustices women suffer – UN official

Within the tragedy of the AIDS pandemic lies an opportunity for changing male behaviour, particularly the discrimination against women that has been spotlighted as the disease has spread, especially in Africa, the head of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said today.

“I am very, very hopeful that this epidemic, which is hitting women, particularly in Africa, so badly, I think is a huge opportunity also,” Dr. Peter Piot said in launching a new “Agenda for Action on Women and AIDS.”

The Agenda from the UNAIDS-led Global Coalition on Women and AIDS urges world leaders to keep the promises they made at a General Assembly special session in 2001 to tackle the underlying social, cultural and economic factors that have intensified the impact of the disease on the lives of women and girls.

“All the discrimination, all the injustices that women are subject to are becoming now so blatant, are becoming so directly linked to death – they always have been – but it is now so obvious, that I think we have an opportunity here and when I see the leadership of women in many, many countries in terms of fighting AIDS, it’s obvious,” Dr. Piot said.

More women are involved in the fight against AIDS than in many other issues, he said. In the beginning this was because no one wanted to deal with the subject, but now the priority was the survival of women. Male behaviour may change now that it has become clear that the existing pattern leads to death, Dr. Piot said.

Much of the progress made in fighting AIDS has been progress for men. He cited an observation he recently heard that adolescent girls may become an extinct species in certain countries.

Two-thirds of young women in sub-Saharan Africa still do not know how HIV is transmitted, UNAIDS said. In Bangladesh, less than one in five married women surveyed had heard of AIDS. In many countries, women are unequal partners in relationships.

“In much of Africa and Asia, between 50 and 60 per cent of all women are married before their 18th birthdays – often to older men, who have been sexually active for longer and who are more likely to have acquired sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV,” the agency said.

In an accompanying statement, Dr. Piot recalled that five years ago Member States agreed that gender equality and women’s empowerment were fundamental to ensuring an effective response to AIDS.

“Specific pledges were made to promote women’s rights, protect women and girls from discrimination, and improve their access to vital services, such as education and the prevention of mother-to-child transfer of HIV. Some progress has been made, but major opportunities to stem the global epidemic are being missed,” he said.

“The ultimate criterion to judge all AIDS programmes is ‘Does this work for women and girls?’” he said. While he stressed that he supported condom promotion, he said some methods of doing this only increased macho behaviour.

Besides advocating securing women’s rights and reviewing existing anti-HIV strategies for the “gender dimension,” the Global Coalition called for an increase in the number of women on national coordinating bodies to make sure programmes work for women.

Dr. Piot was joined at the launch by two members of the Leadership Council of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS. They were former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) Mary Robinson, now Executive Director of Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative, and Ludfine Anyango of ActionAid Kenya, a widow who said she was infected by an abusive husband.