Tackling AIDS pandemic requires guarding rights of women, UN meeting told

As participants at a major United Nations conference in New York today reviewed the increasing prevalence of HIV/AIDS in women compared to men, the head of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said the only way to reverse the feminization of the pandemic is to make sure that women have greater control of their bodies and their lives, as well as of public policies and budgets.

Only by addressing the needs and human rights of women and ensuring their full participation in decision-making could the course of the HIV pandemic be changed, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid said at a panel discussion on ways to end the increased feminization of the disease.

She was speaking on the second day of the three-day UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting to review the progress made in the fight against HIV/AIDS since governments pledged to tackle the social and cultural factors intensifying the impact of the disease at their 2001 special session on the issue.

Ms. Obaid, who moderated the panel, noted that 20 years ago one third of people infected with HIV were women. “Today it has climbed to nearly half,” she said.

In the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, many more women than men were being infected, with about 75 per cent of all HIV-positive women living in sub-Saharan Africa, while in the United States, AIDS was now the leading cause of death for African-American women, she said.

“Less than 10 per cent of pregnant women in the developing world were offered services to prevent mother-to-child (HIV) transmission in 2005.” In addition, “only 20 per cent of young women can correctly identify the ways to prevent HIV infection,” Ms. Obaid said.

Listing reasons for the increased feminization of AIDS, panellists mentioned unequal power relations, discrimination and violence against women, along with, all too often, less access to education, less say in sexual relations and frequent experience with non-consensual sex. They were marginalized in deciding on the use of public funds and had little role to play in designing public AIDS policies.

Jamaica’s National Youth Ambassador for Positive Living, Keesha Effs, said, “HIV has revealed an endangered species,” namely young women, who, “due to predetermined biological make-up, socio-economic disempowerment, culturally-manufactured stigma and discrimination, and extensive exposure to non-consensual sex,” had become a high-risk population.

Calling the feminization of AIDS a symptom of gender inequity, the Minister of the Special Secretariat for Policies for Women of Brazil, Nilcéa Freire, said the problem was exacerbated by inadequate public policies aimed at guaranteeing women’s rights, a persistent focus on just the reproductive aspects of women’s health, and a lack of access to education and the services that promoted women’s rights in all aspects of their lives, including sexuality.

The persistence of cultural and religious standards that interfered negatively in the adoption of preventive measures, such as the use of both male and female condoms, had only made matters worse, she said.

Other participants noted that under the “Abstention, Be faithful, use Condoms” (ABC) policy, the riskiest situations for African women were to be married, or to be young, as in both cases, women lacked the power to choose. In a survey, 71 per cent of South African women said they had experienced coercion. In those and other circumstances, women often lacked the power to negotiate the use of male condoms with their sexual partners and lacked access to female condoms for themselves.