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Manuella Donato [ profile ] |
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Jun 17th, 2011 - 08:40:43 |
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http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/alice-welbourn/calm-down-dear-factor-writ-large-aids-women-and-un?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+opendemocracy+%28openDemocracy%29The
"calm down dear" factor writ large: AIDS, women and the UN
Alice Welbourn , 17
June 2011
-
In the words of the African parable, when elephants fight, its the grass
that suffers. Then what will they have to survive on? Alice Welbourn reports
on the plethora of men on the platform in New York....
About the author Alice Welbourn is Director of the Salamander Trust and a member of the
UNESCO Global Advisory Group for sex, relationships and HIV education. She
is on the steering committee of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS
(GCWA) and co-founded and chairs its UK chapter the SOPHIA Forum
The UN High Level Meeting on AIDS
is something which has taken place twice before in 2001 and 2006. This
latest one, which took place in New York last week, is the third in the 30
years history of the pandemic. It is also likely to have been the last
presumably because politicians have moved on and other pressing issues crowd
their agendas. Yet for those of us still living with this virus every day
and trying to protect others from acquiring it, there remained and remains
- much work to be done.
True there was a huge
breakthrough,
in that men who have sex with men were recognized for the first time as a
discrete group in the outcome
document a hugely
contested 105-paragraph-long statement. But I will leave
the significance of that for others to explain. Here I focus instead on what
the document means or doesnt mean for women, and how many of us feel
about it.
Well, first of all, you could be forgiven for supposing that women arent
allowed at these meetings. The Civil Society
Hearingswhich
preceded this meeting, in early May, included a panel on which there
was *not one* female speaker. One would have thought that, given that nearly
52 % of the 34
million people with HIV worldwide are female ,
at least one woman might have been allowed a space on the podium. No. A few
women *were* invited to speak from the floor but that hardly sounds very
democratic to me. How about some of the male speakers offering up their
places to these women? Chance would be a fine thing. In the High Level
Meeting itself, the Thematic
PanelDiscussion
on Women and Girls consisted of a row of
menin
suits and one lone token African woman on the end of the line. These
men
are all very importantand
some are very much in support of womens rights including the sexual
and reproductive
rightsof
women living with HIV. I am still trying to understand, however, why
such
a high level panel found it so difficult to find a few more women to grace
the platform. If, for example, the focus had been on medical male
circumcisionor
on
menand
boys, I find it hard to imagine that men would have found it
acceptable
to just be stuck in the audience. Why and how do men keep managing to seize
the limelight and hold onto it? Why and how do they manage to go on being so
immune to any criticism of inequitable representation? How do women manage
to start to claim the space that is rightly ours in such supposedly
democratic processes? When will men move beyond the calm down
dear
stance? Can someone please share the answers?
How about the final outcome document, known as the Political
Declaration,
itself? Well of those 105 paragraphs, (and remember again, half of us with
HIV are women), a princely (?) sum of
fourparagraphs
were dedicated to women. And what did they focus on? Our capacity
to have babies. And what was their concern about our having babies? Whether
they could eliminatemother
to child transmission or not. Care and support for women? Hardly.
Interest in women as equally intelligent sentient human beings with brains,
guts, initiative, resilience? Sorry? Concern for womens sexual and
reproductive rights,
safetyand
well-being and rights to property,
inheritanceand
access to
paidwork
throughout the rest of our lives, (even) when we are not pregnant?
Well, OK, if you must: some of this squeezed into one paragraph (no. 30).
Just to drive the point home, delegates insisted on sticking to the
languageof
Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission, rather than the more
medical and less loaded term,
verticaltransmission,
which we and UNAIDS - had been advocating for. Hmm, you
guessed it there were quite a few of us who feel excluded by this
document. It does strike us as faintly ironic that, unless you are pregnant,
as a woman, you are not likely to receive any prevention education, an HIV
test, or anti-retroviral treatment in most parts of the world. So whilst
governments are doing their utmost to keep babies HIV
free(which
of course we want too), as soon as that baby girl starts to grow, she
becomes hugely vulnerableto
HIV until she is pregnant and then its often too late for her to
avoid
it. (And boys, by the way, also become vulnerable to HIV - period but that
is yet another story.) What kind of effective process is that?
What is more, during the intense negotiations in the weeks and days leading
to the HLM itself, there was strong
resistancefrom
the US and EU to committing to firm targets for prevention through
sex,
injecting drug use, mother to child transmission, the huge resource gap
and treatment for those of us with HIV. By not firmly committing to
percentages of achievement by 2015, it is extremely hard to hold governments
to account for their funding commitments. Eventually, they were persuaded to
include working
towards
.
targets but not without a lot of pressure.
And what of women ourselves? What was and is *our* message to these
delegates?
In preparation for this High Level Meeting, a number of us decided to
conduct a global virtual
consultationof
women around the world through a quantitative and qualitative
questionnaire, using Survey monkey, email and hard copies, to reach a broad
range of women and girls in all our diversities. This was the first time
that such a global consultation had taken place in the 30 year history of
the pandemic. We were determined to try to create a process that might
vaguely begin to democratize (digital
divideapart)
some of these UN processes. In just two weeks, after translating the
questionnaire and distributing it in 9 languages, we achieved a huge
response from a rich diversity of over 800 women from 95 countries
worldwide. What came out loud and clear from this questionnaire were the
following firm demands from women around the world, in a
documentwhich
we managed to launch in a
sideevent
in New York:
Ensure comprehensive and inclusive HIV services that address the visions,
life-long needs, and rights of women and girls in all our diversity.
Eliminate stigma and discrimination, and ensure full protection of the
human rights of all women and girls, including our sexual and reproductive
rights.
Strengthen, invest in, and champion our leadership and equality to ensure
the full and meaningful participation of women and girls, in particular
those of us living with and affected by HIV, in the HIV response.
Empower us to be catalysts of social justice and positive change, and
eliminate all forms of violence against us.
Ensure full access to information and education, including comprehensive
sexuality education for all women and girls.
None of this is rocket-science, you might say. What is so special about our
demands? You are quite right they are indeed fairly pedestrian. We are
also wondering why we are *still* asking for such basic issues, thirty years
on. Maybe the reason why is also the one behind the plethora of men on the
platforms of New York. In the words of the African parable, when elephants
fight, its the grass that suffers. *Then *what will they have to survive
on?
--
Manuella Donato
Regional Focal Point - Latin America
Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS
Gonçalves Maia, 1000/103. Recife, PE. Brazil
+55 81 99244408 | manuella (at) gyca.org
www.gyca.org | www.tigweb.org
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