Where sexism aids and abets disaster
By Lisa W. Karanja
Comment
Friday, August 15, 2003
http://www.nationaudio.com/News/DailyNation/Today/Comment/Comment150820035.html
Hadija N., a 29-year-old Ugandan woman, tested HIV-positive in 1994. For years, her husband routinely forced her to have unprotected sex with him and beat her viciously. On one occasion, he attacked her so violently that he bit off half of her left ear. While he himself lay dying of Aids and too weak to beat her, he ordered his younger brother to beat her instead.
Hadija is not alone. Many African women are infected and dying because their husbands rape and subject them to other forms of physical abuse and intimidation so that they cannot protect themselves.
Threats of domestic violence also reduce women's access to HIV/Aids services and information that could save their lives. Meanwhile, their governments are doing little or nothing to protect them.
While many people are aware of the Aids ravages, few understand the disproportionate effect it continues to have on African women. Of black Africa�s 29.4 million HIV-positive people, more than 58 per cent are reported to be women.
In 2002, the United Nations estimated that, along with the Middle East, black Africa was one of only two regions where women and girls formed the majority of infected cases.
In Uganda, HIV prevalence among women aged 20-24 was about 15 per cent in 2001, compared with only 5 per cent for men of the same age. Kenyan girls aged 15-19 are anywhere from three to six times as likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts.
In Tanzania, UN studies indicate that 750,000 women were living with Aids in 2002 against 550,000 men. In Ethiopia the ratio was 1.1 million to 800,000.
The difference in HIV infection rates among African men and women is not a biological curiosity � it is a human rights tragedy. Violence, or the threat of violence, deprives women of their ability to control their bodies or to negotiate safer sex.
A fear of violence prevents women from obtaining Aids information, from testing for HIV infection and from receiving treatment and counselling. Unequal property rights upon separation or divorce discourage women from leaving violent marriages.
HIV-positive victims of "property grabbing" lose assets that are essential for medical care and for the shelter required to endure this debilitating disease.
The fact that this occurs in Uganda, widely considered a "success story" in the fight against Aids, has grim implications for Africa's women.
Countries seeking to combat Aids must acknowledge the prevalence of domestic violence throughout Africa. According to UN statistics, 41 per cent of Ugandan women suffered domestic violence in 2000.
Fida-Kenya�s 2001 report details domestic violence as the most common human-rights violation in Kenya, while 60 per cent of married women reported in a 2002 study that they were victims of domestic abuse.
A 2001 study in Dar es Salaam on HIV and partner violence found that HIV-positive women were about three times more likely than HIV-negative women to have experienced a violent attack by a partner.
While domestic violence is not uniquely an "African" problem, the ways in which states fail to protect women from domestic violence, and, ultimately, HIV transmission recur regionally.
Domestic violence is a complex social problem that cannot be solved by legal reform alone. However, laws proscribing gender discrimination are an essential first step. Governments must enact legislation that makes domestic violence a serious crime and addresses issues of enforcement and compensation.
In a continent devastated by Aids, any strategy to combat the pandemic will be compromised if African governments continue to ignore the threat of violence against women.
Hadija is mother of two, a 10-year-old boy and a girl, 13. Her children will be orphaned when she finally succumbs to Aids. Uganda�s leadership in the fight against Aids has saved many lives, but it has failed Hadija and countless others.
Greater attention to women's human rights is needed from all governments if we are going to save Africa's women and children from the plague.
Lisa W. Karanja is the Orville Schell Fellow with the Women�s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, New York.
