No choice for female AIDS victims

THE EDITOR: I was very impressed by the renewed fervor and focus shown in the media on the occasion of World HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, in the ongoing struggle against the spread of the disease, and noted with considerable interest the increasing number of cries made in support of chastity before marriage and fidelity after marriage as being, unquestionably, the most effective route to protection against HIV/AIDS.

The TT Coalition Against Domestic Violence is deeply concerned with the spread of the disease, even more so because the highest number of new cases in TT appears among girls and young women from the ages of 15-26, which has a potential impact on the number of babies that will be born with HIV/AIDS, until the country realises the gruesome future foretold by Professor Bartholomew. One of the most distressing things, however, which arises from this obviously well meaning debate, is that many of the advocates of the “abstinence and fidelity” route are not putting two and two together. The missing factor, which people are prone to dismiss as if it did not matter, is violence against women.

These worthy advocates are for some strange reason assuming that for the young women who get infected, sex, either in or out of marriage, is consensual, and even stranger, that women, the highest number of new victims, have a choice when it comes to abstinence before marriage and fidelity afterwards. What statistics we have indicate that for most of those who have been infected, abstinence may have been their choice, but it was not a choice that they were allowed to make. The partners who gave them the disease were older and more powerful, and the younger the victim, the less chance she had. In some cases it was rape or incest, neither consensual, in other cases, the aftermath of those, often leading to transactional sex in which school girls, wanting to get out of the misery and abuse they were experiencing, traded what had become devalued to them for money to buy school books and uniforms.

They were looking for a way out, hoping that education would provide a means of rising above the conditions they were living in. When you are sixteen and living a life of abuse with nowhere to run to, you’ll believe anything anybody says to offer you a way of escape. Choice of abstinence? Who says they have a choice? Has the spectre of domestic and gender based violence still not connected with HIV/AIDS? For fidelity after marriage to be an effective counter against HIV/AIDS, it has to be on the part of both parties. How many women victims who have been faithful to their spouses have been infected anyway because their partners were not? And if they suspected that their partners were not faithful, how many of them had the power to refuse sex to their unfaithful husbands/partners?
In Trinidad and Tobago? Get real!

The abstinence and fidelity advocates no doubt feel genuinely that this is the way to go. After all, there is evidence that it worked in Ghana. This is not Ghana. The traditional values of respect for the elders and what they advise that exists there, and therefore worked there, are long gone from TT. Abstinence and fidelity have value in and for themselves, and if they are part of your values, by all means advocate them, but do not assume that what will work for the male (abstinence and fidelity are intrinsically protective for the male and powerful only) will provide an answer for female victims.

In most cases the choice is not theirs to make. Hanging the focus of the HIV/AIDS campaign on these two factors implies that once again, the female victims will be blamed when they had no choice in what happened to them. That there are exceptions to the case is always true, but research done in TT by T Johnson in pursuance of a Master’s Degree for NYSU, supported by research published by Dr M McEvoy, former Director of UNAIDS in the Caribbean and not contra-indicated by any other research, has shown that in the majority of cases, sexual contact for girls and young women that has led to infection was not with their free consent.

DIANA MAHABIR-WYATT
Chair
TT Coalition Against Domestic Violence