Women are at the frontline of the international Aids agenda for 2004. Elisabeth Crafer, director of Positively Women, and Dr Alice Welbourn, chair of ICW (the International Community of Women Living with HIV), comment
Elisabeth
Crafer, PW: Gender and race provide a rich growing ground for the spread of
HIV. Women the world over are particularly vulnerable, given their unequal
position in society.
The health model for HIV was driven, hugely successfully, by gay men using a similar approach to that used by the feminists, but it is still essentially a male construct.
Safer sex for women is as much about pregnancy, chlamydia (and its potential for infertility and ectopic pregnancy) and sexual politics, as it is about HIV. The power dynamics of heterosexuality have always affected women’s health and still make it hard for women to negotiate safer sex. Lack of safer sex for women leads to economic dependency. Poverty and repeated pregnancies are the ravagers of women’s health.
So the question to ask is this. Have the current social and clinical responses to HIV made things better for women - or worse?
There are currently two issues that seem to me like deliberate moves to deny women’s rights and to increase the transmission of HIV.
Globally some 4,000 people with HIV die every week. That’s the equivalent of the World Trade Centre being blown up weekly. The fund to assist people affected by 9/11 reached $526m. Maybe the pain of 9/11 in turn led to a little empathy with those who, worldwide, have no access to HIV treatments, and prompted the US administration’s recent announcement of billions of dollars for Aids.
But the health education aspect of the funding is solely for programmes promoting abstinence; a really great way to increase HIV and keep women’s rights locked up.
The Catholic Church too, has formidable power over the lives and health of women. Not only does the Pope give the thumbs down to contraception and abortion, but now his emissaries all over the world are pushing the line that condoms do not stop the transmission of HIV, claiming in defiance of science that the virus can leak through condoms.
So how to go forward? I believe women have a responsibility to get the real issues affecting women’s health, visibility, power and poverty into the heart of the HIV debate. We still have a long way to go.
(These are of course my views, not necessarily those of PW, which is a mixed status group with staff from 10 countries and with 14 languages between us.)
Dr
Alice Welbourn, ICW: HIV is about real people, their real lives and deaths.
Whoever we are, wherever we live, we positive women and girls especially should
reflect on how much we contribute to our families, communities and wider societies.
For this reason ICW is challenging the global community to stand in solidarity with those of us who have HIV and Aids. Key international allies such as the Girl Guides and the YWCA have responded to this challenge, resolving to make their organisations safe for HIV positive people. We hope that more organisations will soon follow suit.
At ICW we campaign in three key areas. We fight for global access to care and treatment for HIV and opportunistic infections. We fight for a meaningful involvement in all decisions which affect our lives. And we fight for our sexual, reproductive, legal and financial rights.
As someone said, “a woman’s work is invisible until it is not done.” Last year over one million families realised this when they lost a female relative to Aids. While agreements to make medicines more accessible to less developed countries is a small step in the right direction, there is still little political or economic will behind this, in comparison, for instance, with the arms trade.
There is hope. ICW is gradually being invited more regularly to take part in behind-the-scenes international and national consultations around the issues that affect our lives, and not just to give tokenistic speeches at prominent gatherings. But, until our members stop getting sick and dying, and receive the support they need to find the time as well as the courage to adopt such public roles, we will continue to feel hugely over-stretched and over-stressed.
Let 2004 - the year of Women and HIV - be the year when our visions of treatment, respect, involvement, equity, peace and justice are at last realised - to transform the lives of us all.
