How AIDS is turning into a women’s issue
HIV/AIDS has now been around for 3 decades, and worldwide there are over 40 million people infected with the virus. Most of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, and now for the first time more than half of them are women and girls. And in youth under age 24 women make up two thirds of those who have HIV/AIDS.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently termed this increase in women’s AIDS rates ‘a terrifying pattern’ that we are now seeing internationally. Women were less affected than men for the first thirty years of AIDS, but suddenly the disease is taking its toll amongst them, due particularly to a number of cultural factors.
In Africa the cultural pattern has young women marrying older men who have previously contracted the disease through affairs or by visiting prostitutes. The traditionally conservative and religious way of life in Africa calls for chastity amongst girls and women, but does not apply to men, which results in disease being carried home to infect the spouse. The same conservative ethic means there is a reluctance to discuss sexually transmitted disease, or even to be tested for it. It is said that many people would rather face death itself than to risk being rejected by friends and family if they tested positive for the disease.
Queen Noor, the widow of King Hussein of Jordan, and an outspoken activist in international women’s issues, claims that this is both a dire public health issue and a profound human rights issue. She points out that married women have no control over their own exposure to this deadly disease and that cultural norms in many nations expect and support male promiscuity.
Additionally in many African societies widows are not able to claim any inheritance of the family property when her husband dies, as it returns to his side of the family. This cultural practice, besides being a violation of human rights, undermines women’s financial security, and often requires her unsafe sexual behaviour just for survival.
The UN Development Fund for Women (Unifem) knows that rape, violence, threats, economic dependence and deprivation as well as lack of education all make women more susceptible to unwanted sex, which leads to them more likely to be infected with AIDS. The women are in no position to bargain, or to say no. A recent survey in South Africa showed that over one third of young women reported they were afraid of refusing sexual advances, and another third claimed their first sexual encounter was forced on them.
Mr Annan and other authorities are calling on men to be responsible to their wives and children by ensuring education for their daughters, and by abstaining from risky sexual behaviour that puts themselves and their families at risk.
Reference: http://www.thebody.com/index/whatis/demo_africa.html