Violence against women - The HIV/AIDS connection

Article: Salome Donkor
In every country across the globe, a number of women suffer daily acts of violence perpetrated by men they know, as well as strangers.
The perpetrators include husbands, boyfriends, family members, teachers and employers of the victims.
No matter their race or religion, ethnicity, class or creed, women as housemaids, married women, school girls, professionals, advocates of human rights, women are vulnerable to violence just because they are women.
Victims and survivors of violence suffer the ordeal in their own homes, endure groping and sexual propositions in their offices, both from subordinates and superiors and face harassment on the streets.
In Ghana the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre published the first widespread study on gender-based violence in the country, Breaking the Silence and Challenging the Myths of Violence Against Women and Children in Ghana (referred to as the “Nkyinkyim Project”) in 1999.
The publication, a comprehensive study of Violence Against Women (VAW), was compiled from the experiences and perceptions of violence, as well as recollections, opinions and records shared with a team of researchers over a ten month period.
One of the 12 critical areas of concern in the Declaration and Platform for Action at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995 was violence against women.
In pursuit of the country’s strategic objectives to take measures to prevent and eliminate VAW, The Ark Foundation, an advocacy-based women’s human rights non-governmental organisation, with support from the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), has published a manual on violence against women and HIV/AIDS this year.
The document is to inform service providers and policy makers to understand the connection between the two issues.
Violence against women happens in a frightening array of forms and the manual lists them as rape, sexual assault, incest, sexual harassment and exploitation, female infanticide, forced pregnancy and forced abortion.
Others include forced sterilisation, female genital mutilation, intimidation at school and at work, psychological abuse, sexual abuse of girl children, child marriage trafficking, cruel widowhood rites and customary servitude, while some women are tricked or abducted and sold to serve as sex-slaves in foreign countries.
These forms of violence, have complicated causes and effects and manual focuses on VAW, which it describes as the most prevalent form of gender-based violence.
This is because VAW directly facilitates the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, since every form of VAW plays a part in increasing women’s risk of infection.
The booklet describes VAW as any violence against a woman because she is a woman and that disproportionately affects women.
According the World Health Organisation (WHO), most studies on VAW indicate that the majority of the perpetrators of the act are men and that women are at the greatest risk of violence from men they know, while women and girls are the most frequent victims of violence within the family and between intimate partners.
According to the document, domestic violence, which included physical, sexual, economic, emotional/psychological and social abuse, is the most common and most under-addressed form of VAW.
It says the act undermines women’s ability to protect themselves from HIV infection and refers to a wide-range of violent behaviours between intimate partners or family members, as well as abuse between members of a household.
Domestic violence is also often referred to as family violence, spousal abuse, wife abuse, wife assault and woman battering.
In view of the realisation that the two problems go hand-in-hand, many groups and communities are developing programmes to discuss and act on this complex problem.
The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees has created guidelines on responding to sexual violence in refugee settings. Other bodies are developing guidelines on violence and partner notification for voluntary counselling and testing.
United Nation bodies and international NGOs are financing and carrying out micro-credit schemes to address women’s economic vulnerability that leads to both violence and susceptibility to the contraction of HIV/AIDS.
The ARK Foundation says that individuals and communities have so much to do by adopting various actions at the work place and in the community to help change the world so that neither HIV/AIDS nor VAW can flourish.
The booklet calls on people who have the opportunity to speak to many people at once, either because they regularly address a particular audience, for example in the church, or at organised workshop or during group discussions and other opportunities to disseminate helpful information on HIV/AIDS, its link to VAW and encourage participants to talk about these issues.
The manual recommend that people should get involved in the activities of an organisation in their areas that provides services to people living with HIV/AIDS or abused women, stressing that such groups are typically happy to have volunteers.
It also called for the involvement of women in all levels of group decision-making and programming in schools, churches or community, who should be encouraged and respected as leaders enact the gender equality we believe in, provides role models for young women, and ensure that women’s perspectives become part of all decisions that affect them.
These include plans for education and prevention strategies, research and development priorities, allocation of resources for treatment, social support and health care delivery.
It also recommends that people should work with others to educate more people, assist those in need, and build prevention initiatives, through the use of partnerships and networking with local, regional, national and international organisations, to mobilise more resources and carry out positive messages to reach a greater audience.
To help women overcome some of the problems associated with VAW and to control the spread of HIV/AIDS, the booklet calls for women’s empowerment in the form of access to resources and information and the ability of women to make choices about their sexuality.