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HIV/AIDS increasingly claims girls and women

"What was once a predominantly male disease has become a heterosexually-spread pandemic which is now consigning tens of millions of girls and women to a cruel, slow death due to AIDS," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. "Just as we cannot become complacent about HIV/AIDS in the industrialised world, we cannot stand by and permit this incipient holocaust to occur."

Ms. Bellamy said that the spread of HIV/AIDS among girls and women is taking place amid an atmosphere of pervasive gender-based discrimination. Some 73 million girls worldwide are denied the right to education and the majority of the world's one billion illiterates are female. Deprived of the opportunity to receive an education and to participate in their societies as equals to men, millions of girls are relegated to subsistence and domestic chores instead of attending school and building a future. At the same time, the widespread under-valuing of girls and women is evidenced by their denial of access to basic health care. Every minute of every day, a girl or woman dies due to preventable complications of childbirth.

The HIV/AIDS crisis among females is compounded by the fact that girls and women run a greater physiological risk than boys and men of contracting HIV from infected partners. Ms. Bellamy cited the most recent UNAIDS figures, which show a radical increase in the number of females infected with HIV.

• Women or girls now account for 43 per cent of the estimated 33 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS.
• In Brazil, in 1984, only one woman was HIV positive for every 99 men infected with the virus. Today, women account for one-fourth of all those infected with HIV.
• In Africa, the risk for girls aged 15-24 is two to one, compared with boys, in countries where the majority of infections is among the young. In sub-Saharan Africa, infected women now outnumber men six to five.
• In western Kenya, almost one in four girls between 15 and 19 is living with HIV, compared to only one in 25 boys in the same age group. In Zambia, three times as many girls are infected as boys.

The challenge posed by the spreading HIV/AIDS epidemic among girls and women involves issues of basic human rights and urgently requires adequate services to prevent the spread of HIV, Ms. Bellamy said. "We are faced with age-old cultural values which have subordinated women and denied them the same rights as have been accorded to men. The resulting widespread abuse and discrimination are nowhere more clearly evident than in the chilling fact that huge numbers of socially powerless women are being infected with HIV by their husbands. Hand in hand with the battle to defeat HIV/AIDS, we need to ensure that girls and women are accorded full equality in all areas of life."

HIV infection among females cannot be divorced from sexual coercion and the fact that between 16 and 52 percent of all women worldwide suffer abuse from an intimate partner at least once in their lives, Ms. Bellamy added.

"We need to roll back millennia of gender stereotypes that encourage men to be aggressors and women to submit," she stated. "The more girls and women understand and embrace their rights, the more they make decisions that are beneficial to their health and well-being. The bottom line is that when the rights of girls and women are realised, the benefit extends to all members of society."

The UNICEF chief noted a broad range of additional factors that contribute to the spread of HIV infection among females: tens of thousands of girls and women are sold into marriage, prostitution and slavery every year. There has been increasing incidence of rape of women and young girls during armed conflicts. And sexual coercion of young girls is depressingly common. More than half of the girls questioned in studies conducted in Malawi and Papua New Guinea reported that their first sexual experience was forced upon them when they were, respectively, as young as 13 and 11 years of age.

Where HIV/AIDS has been contained, education and public awareness have been essential components of the preventive strategy. But in many places, there is extreme resistance to even acknowledging the reality of the disease. Ms. Bellamy cited the example, in South Africa, of a woman, Gugu Dlamini, who was stoned to death after revealing her HIV status on World AIDS Day last year.

Nevertheless, Ms. Bellamy added, a potent weapon against the spread of HIV/AIDS is grass roots work such as that being undertaken by UNICEF and several partner organisations in West Bengal on behalf of 8,000 child sex workers in Calcutta. Another is the establishment of youth-friendly health services in many countries where young people provide education and counselling about HIV/AIDS and other reproductive health issues to their peers.

"HIV/AIDS changes everything in the developing world, and how we deal with everything else depends on how we deal with this silent emergency. One clear starting point is to see the truth of the epidemic -- it is spreading and its victims, more and more, are girls and women," Ms. Bellamy said.

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