Women and Aids in the Second Millennium

Since the 1980s, researchers and grassroots activists have called for a woman-centered perspective on the AIDS crisis, but somehow women's concerns are still rarely addressed. At the 2006 XVI International AIDS Society Meeting in Toronto, speakers pointed starkly to the rapidly rising rates of infection among young girls and married women, the subordination of women in the family, in the employment sphere, and in educational institutions; and the general assault on women that the epidemic has come to represent. Tragically, however, most of the conference restated what Peter Piot (Director of UNAIDS) and Geeta Rao Gupta (International Center for Research on Women) had said six years earlier at the 2000 XIIIIAS Meeting in Durban, South Africa. Clarion calls to action echoed Piot and Gupta by UNIFEM representatives and by no less than Kofi Anan, the secretary General of the UN, at the 2001 UNGASS (UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS) meeting. But as Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said in Toronto, The one thing that hasn't changed is the grotesque vulnerability of women. In AIDS prevention and treatment, women are often reduced to objects. As women's advocacy groups have argued, we have underused an essential resource-women's own abilities to precipitate social change and to develop strategies. Women's diseases have now been counted, and their knowledge and perceptions of disease analyzed, but we need to facilitate women's control of their own sexuality, their ability to actively make choices, and their capacity to determine strategies and work to change their societies. In the face of global inequalities and crucial issues of race and class, HIV positive women the world over have had to struggle with neglect, isolation, and discrimination. One of the important aims of the current women's coalitions is for positive women and women from the global South to hold leadership positions. These strategies have the best chance of informing scientific perspectives, policy initiatives, and community mobilization in helping to alter women's vulnerability to AIDS. Several outstanding speeches, which represented women as whole people with needs, desires, and insights, were delivered at the Women and Girls Rally and March, organized by a coalition of organizations including Blueprint for Action on Women and Girls (a Canadian advocacy coalition) and ATHENA (an international feminist AIDS advocacy network) before the 2006 opening plenary. Speakers included Mary Robinson, High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002; Helene Gayle, CEO of Care; Stella Lamda, representing sex workers of Quebec; Keesha Larkin, a young positive woman from the Canadian First Nations in British Columbia; Marie Bopp, a 23 year old, who introduced herself with clarity and fierce determination as the face of positive women from the Pacific Islands; and Ann Marie de Sanzo, a former prison inmate speaking for harm reduction and prevention programs for Canadian women in prison. In front of the podium was a work of art by Fiona Kirkwood spelling out the word survival in male and female condoms. Musimbi Kanyoro, an African Episcopal woman minister and, at that time, secretary general of the Worldwide Young Women's Christian Association, called for Holy Disobedience. Kanyoro, a senior officer of a mainstream religious organization, announced that she was convening a forum on women's leadership on AIDS and said explicitly, the female condoms. . . . Bring the sex workers. . . . There are drug users in Africa too .... As an African woman, I can say, we can negotiate safe sex, we can use female condoms, we will use vaccines if they come. Later when Kanyoro delivered her speech at the official Thursday plenary she repeated, We need leaders who can go where angels dare not go. These claims complemented those of the Women's Caucus at the 2002 Barcelona International AIDS Society, which generated what became known as the Barcelona Bill of Rights. …

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