The silence and stigma surrounding this terrible illness are fuelling its spread and stoking a lethal intolerance we must resist with all our might. Last December, Gugu Dlamini, a volunteer for an AIDS organisation in South Africa, announced that she was HIV positive at a rally in Johannesburg, hoping to dispel some of the prejudice against people with the virus. Eleven days later Gugu was beaten to death by neighbours who claimed she had brought shame on the community. The mob violence against this courageous woman was a brutal act of prejudice and intolerance. It was also an ominous reminder of the most vulnerable citizens in our developing countries — the women and children — who are routinely denied their rights to education, economic opportunity and proper health care. They are silenced by ignorance and fear, and doomed by their powerlessness to resist the dangers they face. Consider our women, for example, who raise our children and produce our food. Their social and economic dependence on their husbands is so complete that they cannot refuse their husbands' demands, even when they fear that the men have contracted HIV from other sexual partners. Women also avoid seeking vital medical services and counselling, and rarely do they dare to take the test for HIV, so great is their dread that their husbands will beat them and throw them out into a community where they will be even further ostracized. If grown women are hobbled by their low social status and self-esteem, how can their adolescent daughters resist the sexual advances of older men and the pressures from their communities to marry, despite the potential exposure to HIV? Adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa are six times more likely to be infected than boys of the same age. There is a common and appalling myth in several African nations that a man infected with HIV can cure him self by having sexual relations with a virgin, thus increasing the toll on young girls.
Previous | Contents | Continue
|