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Why is it said in that HIV/AIDS is acquiring a gender face? Because findings by all major players in the field, UNAIDS, World Health Organisation (WHO), etc. have found through statistics collected over years that there has been an increasing evidence of feminisation of HIV/AIDS across the world. Ranjita Biswas reports
Biological factors as well as gender inequality reflected on women’s lower status in society, their economic vulnerability, physical and mental violence by perpetrators, all play a role in the escalating number of women affected by HIV. This becomes clear when we find that infection among women is mostly due to heterosexual sexual transmission. Simply put, they get infected through their husbands/ male partners/ or through forced sex. So a housewife in a Bengal village in a monogamous relationship can get infected by her husband, a migrant labourer perhaps in another part of the country, through his risky behaviour of indulging in unsafe sex. However, it is she who has to face the backlash, literally, with discrimination and social ostracisation, and even facing eviction from her matrimonial home if the husband dies.
Understandably, the feminisation of the disease was a major focus area for discussion during the recently held UN High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS (June 10-11, 2008). The meeting was basically a roll-call on the progress made by the member countries across the world in DoC ( Declaration of Commitment) for achieving Millennium Development Goal post-UNGASS (UN general Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS), 2001. Each country- report, including India’s, has a separate section dwelling on the problems and achievements regarding women vis-a-vis HIV/AIDS.
The UN meeting was also an opportunity to observe how strong the civil society has been become as a participatory force along with state agencies in tackling one of most contentious public health issues of our time.
That non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have a huge role to play, with their proximity to the grassroots do not need elaboration. At the policy level too, community leaders are playing a crucial role in designing future plans and policies so that they are reflected on the funding and other resource allocations for intervention programmes .
As pressure groups NGOs, media, and for implementation, the elected leaders to the parliament have their own role to play in the fight against HIV/AIDS. But it is seldom that they come together on the same platform to discuss the issues, collaborate on ideas so that the work can go forward. In that sense, a ten-day capacity building workshop in Washington D C involving women of these three sections of the civil society prior to the UN meet, was a somewhat unique programme. Conceived by three Washington –based non-profit organisations, International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF), the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), and the Center for Women Policy Studies (CWPS), it brought women activists, communicators and parliamentarians from India, Mexico and Kenya to exchange ideas and views and collaborate on future programmes. The facilitators admitted that it was a novel experiment even for themselves but they concluded that since each section has its own strength, and why not bring them together?
Each of the three countries was represented by two journalists, two community leaders and two parliamentarians. Thus, 18 women exchanged their ideas, experiences and learnt from each other while also deciding on a tentative road map for widening the network. The participants also had opportunity to attend the UN high Level Meeting to get a first-hand experience of how country leaders and experts viewed the current situation in the HIV/AIDS global map, the achievements and disappointments.
For the participants, the most important input was to get introduced to the situation of women and the problems regarding HIV/AIDS in the other two countries. It was easy to see that in all the three countries there are commonalities to the problem though they situated in different corners of the globe. But there are differences too. When a Kenyan woman living HIV spoke how she overcame the stigma and how young women parliamentarians from the country led from the front by going for HIV testing voluntarily, it was a lesson to be learnt and compared with the home situation. Or when a Mexican activist revealed that sex education in her country started at the primary school stage with an introduction to one’s anatomy, and this has been possible due to the continuous campaign by the activists ,one could not help harking back to the Indian situation where ‘to introduce- or not to’ and ‘when’ has bogged down the programme though strongly recommended by educationists and sociologists.
As experts in the field remind, fighting HIV/AIDS needs a multi-pronged approach. For, the disease is not just a disease; with it are intertwined many issues - social, economic, moral. In the campaign against the disease , involving the grassroots workers, communicators, and those who are at the hub of policy change initiatives, each facilitating the other as in the recent orkshop, may yet set a trend. |
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