World AIDS Day Spotlights Women, Violence

Click here to read the new Amnesty International USA report, Women, HIV/AIDS and human rights

EuroNGOs marked World AIDS Day, 1 Dec, by launching a new website

November 30, 2004: As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often reminds us, “AIDS today has a woman’s face.” The pandemic now afflicts as many women as men worldwide and is spreading most rapidly among young women. In sub-Saharan Africa, 75 percent of the infected are young women and girls.

Related Resources:

Condoms4Life Issues Good Shepherd Awards to Catholic Bishops from Four Countries on World AIDS Day Click here for more information Close to half of 37.2 million adults living with HIV are women, according to new UNAIDS/WHO report Click here to read the report From the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative: Frequently Asked Questions about Women & HIV/AIDS Click here to read

The reasons are primarily social:

• Women are physically more vulnerable to HIV than men, for biological reasons.
• Sexual activity starts earlier for women than for men, partly because women marry at younger ages.
• Women experience rape and sexual abuse more than men do, and sexual violence is a major factor in the spread of HIV.
• Young women are often married off to much older and sexually experienced men.
• Women often lack the power to negotiate safer sex (i.e., condom use), especially with their husbands, who may be HIV-positive.
• More women are poor than men, and poverty increases the risk of AIDS exposure through unprotected sex. It also decreases the likelihood of treatment.
• Two-thirds of all illiterate adults are women, who may therefore lack information on how to protect themselves from infection.
• Condoms may not be locally available: if all of Africa’s condoms were equally distributed, each man would receive three per year.

International family planning programs work to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through education, distribution of condoms and other family planning materials, and promotion of women’s rights and empowerment. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights must be protected and laws on divorce and inheritance should be revised to deal with the family realities of AIDS.

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