AIDS is a Global Independence Struggle for
Black Women: Gender Matters
by Yvonne
Scruggs-Leftwich
"AIDS is the number one killer of young African American
women between the ages of 25 and 34."
Conventional wisdom recognizes that the Fourth of July has
little celebratory meaning anywhere else in the world besides the United States
and, maybe in a perverted way, England.
Yet, the language of the Declaration of Independence - written at the
end of the American Revolution by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the nation on
July 4, 1776, 230 years ago - is used by Americans to assert who we are as a
people to ourselves and the world.
Especially the Declarations' pronouncement "...that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." is America's public
trademark.
Today in the United States we like to believe that the
Declaration now includes everyone and that we pretty much have gotten over the
"men" thing in this
document. However, some also recognize
the evidence that the ‘independence'
thing still needs a lot of work as far as black women are concerned.
"We like to believe that the Declaration now includes
everyone and that we pretty much have gotten over the ‘men' thing in this
document."
In many other parts of the world, and specifically in
Africa, work seems not even to have begun for women on the "Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness" values, and certainly there is virtually no
effective intention to "securing" their unalienable right to
"Life," literally. During the
same period when we here in the United States were celebrating Independence Day
this Fourth of July, over 1500 women and their supporters from across the world
began meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in memoriam for the millions of women globally
who have lost their lives to HIV/AID or who are living a death sentence from
the pandemic disease, mainly because, as women, their lives just do not count. From their physical dehumanization in
chauvinistically repressive cultures, through the economic imperative of sex-for-survival from starvation and death,
to the conflict driven conversion of rape into a war-torn weapon of mass
destruction, African women's bodies have become the vehicle for male dominance
and supremacy in Africa and elsewhere.
"African women's bodies have become the vehicle for male
dominance."
The first Global Conference on Women and AIDS, therefore, is
belatedly but appropriately venued in
Kenya, Africa and is being sponsored by
probably the world's largest and oldest women's organization, the World Young Women's Christian
Association (YWCA). Dr. Lorraine Cole,
YWCA- USA's CEO, states:
"The AIDS pandemic, particularly as it affects women,
is a high priority of the World YWCA. Although much attention has been focused in
this country on the plight of HIV and AIDS on the continent of Africa, it also
is a much less well known fact that AIDS is the number one killer of young
African American women between the ages of 25 and 34... (largely) contracted
...in their teens and early twenties.
Therefore, the voice of the YWCA USA on the subject of HIV and AIDS...will be crucial during the
World Council meeting."
Studies report that 54% of new HIV/AIDS infections occur in girls
and young women, and that 80% of these new infections result from sex with
their husbands or primary partners.
Large numbers of these women live in Sub-Sahara Africa.
World Human Rights Watch has repeatedly documented that the
deadly link between women's rights abuses and the spread of HIV/AIDS is slowly
gaining recognition but not before millions of women lost their lives to the
disease.
"The relationship between abuse of women's rights
and their vulnerability to AIDS is acutely clear in Africa."
Evidence indicates that women especially at risk are those
in heterosexual marriages or long term
unions in a society where men commonly engage in sex outside the union and
women confront abuse if they demand condom use.
"Every day in every corner of the world, women and
girls are beaten in their homes, trafficked into forced prostitution, raped by
soldiers and rebels in armed conflicts, sexually abused by their 'caretakers,' deprived of equal
rights to property and other economic assets, assaulted for not conforming to
gender norms and often left with no option but to trade sex for survival."
The Human Rights' report further stated that, "The
relationship between abuse of women's rights and their vulnerability to AIDS is
acutely clear in Africa, where 58 % of those infected with HIV are women ... In
Kenya, simply because of their gender, many AIDS victims sink into poverty and
will die even sooner because customs condone evicting women from their home and
taking their property upon their husbands death."
These are the same husbands by whom, very often, the women were
infected with HIV/AIDS in the first place.
They are the same husbands from whom, often, these women suffered abuse
if they sought to protect themselves with prophylactic measures like condoms or
otherwise not to conform to the gender norms and local customs of their
marriages.
While Africa leads the world in HIV/AIDS incidents and
deaths, many other nations are not far behind. Yale University's AIDS WATCH
reports that the Latin America and the Caribbean regions have the second
highest rates of newly reported cases of HIV. And in the U.S., adding to the
urgency of Dr. Lorraine Cole's statistics on young women, there has been an
alarming up-tick in the incidents' of infections reported for older African American
women, attributed to heterosexual contacts with their
husbands.
"In the U.S., there has been an alarming up-tick in the
incidents' of infections reported for older African American women."
Kenyan Nobel Laureate, Dr. Wangari Maathai, a huge icon for
women's empowerment throughout the developing world as well as Kenya, reports:
"No one can underestimate the challenge that the
tragedy of HIV/AIDS puts before all countries. Nowhere has the devastation been
greater than in sub-Saharan Africa. Methods to alleviate the suffering and,
hopefully, find a cure require our full commitment. For too long, discussing
HIV/AIDS in our communities has been taboo. This must end. We must encourage
free and full public debate on the threat. We must be frank about how the HIV
virus spreads through unprotected sex or intravenous drug use, and how poverty
and inequality between women and men are the major driving forces of the
pandemic in Africa. We must also increase access to information, care and
treatment. In this decisive and difficult struggle in Africa we need the
critical encouragement, support and cooperation from the rest of world so that
we win the battle."
The First Global Conference on Women and Aids which began in
Nairobi on this July 4th, coming more than 25 years after HIV/AIDS first was
identified as an international scourge
in 1982, is a forum which potentially may jump-start serious action on
behalf of abused and expendable women, especially in Africa.
What realistically
can occur may be a heightened awareness among US policymakers, forced by an
increasingly outraged and demanding international community, that real damage
and loss of opportunity is resulting from the emphasis of U.S. President
George Bush's $15 Billion AIDS initiative known as PEPFAR, ( i.e., President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). This plan calls for absolute compliance with
the ABC strategy, which is an
arbitrary, culturally tone-deaf and socially conservative requirement which governs how critically needed
PEPFAR funds can be received by girls and women in these AIDS-decimated
nations. The ABC strategy stands for: A
-Abstinence (rejected by rapists); B - Be
Faithful (rejected by husbands) ; C - Condoms
(rejected by men in general). This is a strategy which is repeatedly rejected by men in many third world cultures.
For millions of
African women, who have no control over abstinence, faithfulness nor the
use of condoms, it is the formula for HIV/AIDS disease and death. It is not the winning strategy for exporting
the American July 4th values of Independence, Freedom and "Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness."
Dr, Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich
chairs the Center for Community and Economic Justice, Inc.'s "Sojourner
Truth Forum for Interactive Justice," headquartered in St. Petersburg,
Florida, and is a Professor, National Labor College - George Meany Campus, in
the Washington DC area. Her web address
is: www.yscruggs.com.
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