Articles

Thinking positive - It is only by listening to those most affected, that we can bring about real change. Ahead of World AIDS Day, Luisa Orza and Jennifer Gatsi Mallet report on a groundbreaking project bringing together parliamentarians and HIV positive women in Namibia.

ICW/ICRW article featured in Commonwealth Secretariat Handbook (2007)
ICW, the Centre for the study of AIDS (CSA), International Center
for Research on Women (ICRW) and Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalisation nitiative (EGI) are working with parliamentarians as part of a consortium to improve women’s access to health care in our countries: Botswana, Namibia, Kenya nd Tanzania. The aim of the Parliamentarians for Women’s Health (PWH) project is to improve parliamentarians’ understanding of the health issues that women, especially HIV-positive women, face, including barriers to accessing treatment and sexual and reproductive health facilities.

Sexual and Reproductive Health Services and HIV Testing: Perspectives and Experiences of Women and Men Living with HIV and AIDS

By Emma Bell, Promise Mthembu, Sue O’Sullivan on behalf of the
International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, and Kevin Moody on behalf of the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS

Exchange on HIV/AIDS, Sexuality and Gender is a quarterly - 16-page magazine on HIV/AIDS from the perspective of gender, sexuality and sexual health. This issue of Exchange focuses on some pressing concerns of women living with HIV and AIDS.

Download latest issue - Autumn 2006:

English (pdf)
French (pdf)
Portuguese (pdf)

An overview article written by guest editor Emma Bell of ICW (International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS) together with her colleague Luisa Orza highlights some of these concerns. One of these is the balancing required by positive women to be able to manage the fears instilled by their positive status (of infecting one’s loved ones, of being stigmatized and discriminated, of abandonment and violence, etc.) with the need for security and support and the desire for intimacy, love and children. Another concern is the lack of recognition of sexual and reproductive rights of women living HIV.

Some of the topics addressed in other articles on this issue are the much-discussed ABC approach to behaviour change and how that ignores complex issues like human needs and desires; the loss of property and land experienced by many women living with or affected by HIV and AIDS in India; and the approach of ‘memory work’ with mothers living with HIV and their children as developed by NACWOLA in Uganda some ten years ago.

Female genital excision is commonly practised in many parts of the world and can often be the cause of HIV infection, through the use of shared cutting instruments. The practice can cause great long-term physical as well as psychological harm.