Action on gender based violence and HIV/AIDS: bringing together research, policy, programming and advocacy

What are the link between gender-based violence and HIV?

Published by: Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL); Program on International Health and Human Rights (PIHHR), 2007
Via: Eldis

At the 2006 International Aids Conference a meeting was convened to explore the linkages between gender based violence (GBV) and HIV. Its objective was to understand common challenges and to inform research, advocacy, policy and practice. This report summarises discussions, outcomes, and recommendations from the consultation. Issues requiring further attention were identified, in particular those necessary to improve future advocacy and research on the topic. Participants recognised the need:

• for an evidence base proving the causal linkages between GBV and HIV
• to carry out this work within the framework of gender-based equality and non-discrimination
• to help government and other partners better understand and address the realities of women’s lives with the objective to inform gender sensitive programming policy
• to challenge elite understandings of what is commonly considered “valuable knowledge” by policy makers

Suggestions for moving the work on linking HIV and GBV forward include:

• developing an overarching strategy
• tracking funding of work at the intersection of HIV and GBV
• developing criteria and minimum standards for donors’ work on the subject

(http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter/policy/HIVAIDS/toronto.pdf)

Understanding positive women's realities

Making the sexual rights of women living with HIV count

By: Bell E & Orza L
Published in:Exchange on HIV/AIDS, Sexuality and Gender, Autum 2006
Via: Eldis

This issue of Exchange, produced in association with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW), focuses on the experience of women living with HIV. The issue focuses particularly on sexual and reproductive rights. It shows how the ABC (Abstain; Be Faithful; Use Condoms) approach, currently favoured by funding bodies such as USAID, ignores the complexity of human needs and desires. There is also a report from India on women who have lost their land due to their HIV status, and a report from Uganda on the ’memory work’ project in which mothers living with HIV and their children have been involved. Despite a growing recognition of the rights of women living with HIV to healthy and fulfilling sexual lives and reproductive choices, there remain many obstacles to women exercising those rights. Women living with HIV have to balance their fears of rejection, abandonment and violence from partners with their need for intimacy and their desire to have children. They also frequently face harsh judgements from health workers about their rights to have sex and children. This includes examples of access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) for women being tied into the use of certain types of contraception. The authors recommend that testing, and other HIV services, be carried out in a sexual rights framework that provides women with the support to deal with these complex issues. They also urge that the voices of women living with HIV be meaningfully included in all HIV policy and programme development.