Statement by Prof. Yakin Ertürk, Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences Prof. Yak?n Ertürk, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, is faculty member at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey to the International Women’s Summit: Women’s Leadership on HIV & AIDS, 4-7 July 2007 – Nairobi

Madam Chairperson, distinguished participants,

It is with great pleasure that I address the International Women’s Summit on HIV/AIDS, in my capacity as the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences. I wish to begin by congratulating YWCA for organizing this important summit and thank them for having invited me.

Current trends in HIV/AIDS have nullified the long held assumptions that women, particularly those who are married and monogamous, are not a risk group in contracting the disease. Women now account for nearly half of all the people living with HIV-AIDS worldwide. Regrettably, HIV infection is one area where gender equality seems to be realized!

In the light of this growing reality, I devoted my 2005 annual report to the Commission on Human Rights to the intersections of violence against women and HIV-AIDS. My primary argument in the report was that the two pandemics are interrelated; therefore, the struggle with HIV-AIDS is intimately linked to the struggle to eliminate violence against women.

Madam Chairperson,

It has become well established that women exposed to HIV are more likely to become infected with HIV as their male counterparts. Women’s subordination and experience of sex in violent forms as well as their biological condition makes them particularly susceptible to the disease. Women may encounter sex in a violent manner, either in or out of their home. Young women are especially at risk. Furthermore, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), which increase the likelihood of contracting HIV, are more likely to be undetected and therefore untreated in women.

The connection between violence against women (VAW) and HIV must be understood in the context of discrimination resulting from the historically rooted and universal phenomenon of gender inequality, which often constrains women’s access to property, resources, information, health services and justice. In communities afflicted by poverty and devastated by HIV, girls are the first to be taken out of school in order to generate income or help take care of the sick. Because women disproportionately bear the burden of care for sick relatives, HIV/AIDS also affects their ability to engage in a remunerated employment to provide for themselves and their families.

Patriarchal power imbalances within families and communities intersects with other sites of oppression such as class, race, ethnicity, displacement, etc., as a result, discrimination and marginalization become compounded and exposure to violence takes multiple forms for the majority of the world’s women.

In many parts of the world, women are not allowed to own property or have access to their own financial resources. In areas of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, a woman’s access to property hinges on her relationship to a man. When she separates from her husband or when her husband dies, she risks losing her home, land, household goods and other property. In many of my official country visits I have seen that lack of equal property rights upon separation or divorce discourages women from leaving violent marriages, as they are faced with the choice of choosing between violence at home and poverty and destitute in the street.

In some regions, customary practices dictate that a man’s property traditionally returns to his natal family upon his death. Consequently, relatives may seize a widow’s possessions with no regard to her health, well-being, or ability to support herself. Because of high HIV mortality rates in Africa, this scenario of “property grabbing” has become increasingly common.

Violence against women by intimate partners in the home, or by strangers outside - whether through community-sanctioned practices; in institutional settings such as hospitals, schools or detention facilities; in the transnational arena as refugees, migrants, or persons trafficked for sexual exploitation; in times of peace or armed conflict - increases the risk of HIV infection for women and of further violence.

Throughout the world, stigma suffered by people living with HIV/AIDS results in discrimination and other violations of human rights. Stigmatization is so prevalent that it has been referred to as the inevitable “third epidemic”, occurring after the “silent” epidemic of HIV infection and the AIDS epidemic. Across cultures, stereotypes remain that people living with HIV/AIDS contracted the disease through some sort of deviant activity. Stigmatization occurs because of misinformation about transmission, fears of infection and the incurability of the disease, and its nature and degree are determined by a variety of social, cultural, political and economic factors, including the stage of the disease and the sex of the infected person.

Stigmatization entails different forms of discrimination, including physical or social exclusion from the family and community and withdrawal of care and support by the family, community and health system. Studies show that women are stigmatized more directly and severely, which exacerbates existing gender, social, cultural and economic inequities. When men contract the disease through sexual intercourse, their proclivity for multiple partners is assumed to be the norm. However, women are almost always branded as loose, promiscuous and immoral. As a result, the worst blame and other forms of stigma are almost always reserved for those women thought to be responsible for HIV through ‘improper’ or immoral sexual behaviour. Only those HIV positive women, who are ‘proven’ to be sexually pure and live a faithful and monogamous life, may expect to enjoy empathy and support.

Madam Chairperson,

In essence, feminized poverty and multiple layers of subordination that increase women’s exposure to violence, limit women’s sexual and reproductive rights, increase stigmatization and discrimination and constrain their access to proper medical care, are all causes and consequences of HIV. In spite of ample empirical evidence to this effect, states have yet to fully acknowledge and act upon the interconnection between the mutually reinforcing pandemics of VAW and HIV-AIDS.

Governments, by and large, fail to take into consideration gender-based discrimination in formulating policies to combat the disease. Instead, there is a general tendency to continue to emphasize abstinence as a method of prevention. At most, intervention strategies may be designed to target specific groups of women, such as migrants, women who are trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation or women in the sex sector. Such programmes, although important, are often triggered by stereotyping and prejudice, therefore, may result in further victimization of these women.

Programmes aimed at the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS cannot succeed without challenging the structures of unequal power relations between women and men. In this regard, an integrated approach is needed to tackle the impact of gender inequality, while at the same time to reach specific risk groups. National policies and action plans would be vastly more effective if they acknowledged and acted on the interconnectedness between the two pandemics of HIV and VAW.

Enabling approaches must allow women to gain control over their sexual and reproductive lives as well as to exercise a broader range of political, economic, social and cultural rights. These range from “gender-sensitive” programmes that acknowledge that men and women may have different needs, to “empowerment interventions” that strive to enhance women’s capacity and ability to take initiative and control over matters related to their life and to “transformative interventions” that seek to “change the underlying conditions and values that cause and sustain gender inequities”.

Recent research results from 11 African countries, presented at a meeting held in Kigali on 28 June 2007, revealed that in a considerable proportion of discordant couples it is the female partners who are infected and a likely source of transmission to their male spouses. Clearly, more research is needed to reach sound conclusions from this data, otherwise it can be used to implicate and blame women further. However, what we do know for sure at this point is that marriage is the new route of the epidemic and that rates of infection in young women are three to ten times higher than those for men. These empirical facts need to be accounted for if effective intervention strategies are to be designed.

In the conclusion of my report I expressed full support for the internationally agreed targets contained in a number of different United Nations documents and the relevant recommendations to which governments have committed themselves. I have elaborated further recommendations under five main headings, which include the following:

· elimination of violence against women;
· addressing gender dimensions of HIV-AIDS, discrimination and stigma;
· ensuring equal access to health care for women;
· empowering women for the full enjoyment of all human rights;
· joining of the community of states to promote a global initiative against HIV-AIDS to collectively:
- ensure that the poor worldwide have access to affordable drugs;
- press for demilitarization and a strong condemnation of all forms of violence against women and girls in armed conflict;
- support research, particularly female-controlled prevention methods;
- prioritize political and financial support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
I truly hope, Madam Chairperson, that we will close this summit with an enhanced understanding of the gender dimensions of HIV-AIDS and a firmer commitment on the part of states and other relevant actors, including the private sector and recognition of women’s agency and leadership to end the two mutually reinforcing pandemics of VAW and HIV-AIDS.
Thank you for your attention.