PC(USA) - International AIDS Ministries - Issues


	Women and girls
	The epidemic’s impact is particularly hard on women and girls as the burden of care usually falls on them. Girls drop out of school to care for sick parents or for younger siblings. Older women often take on the burden of caring for ailing adult children and later, when these adult children die, adopt the parental role for the orphaned children. They are often also responsible for producing an income or food crops. Older women caring for orphans and sick children may be isolated socially because of AIDS-related stigma and discrimination. Stigma also means that family support is not a certainty when women become HIV-positive; they are too often rejected, and may have their property seized when their husband dies.

	Mothers and caregivers of Children. Photo by Frank Dimmock. When the primary mode of HIV transmission is heterosexual, young women are the worst affected. The proportion of women living with HIV who are over 15 years old is 1.7 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions of the country. (Population Reference Bureau, 2003). In Trinidad and Tobago, the number of women between 15 and 19 years old with HIV is five times higher than among adolescent males (Pisani, 2003).

	The higher biological vulnerability of girls and women to HIV infection is one explanation for the growing number of young women infected with HIV. However, gender power imbalances, patterns of sexual networking, and age-mixing are important factors that tip the balance further against them. In sub-Saharan Africa, girls are having sex at an earlier age than boys, and their sexual partners tend to be older. More than 45 quantitative studies in sub-Saharan Africa on age differences between girls 15 to 19 years old and their sexual partners show that many male partners are six or more years older. Typically, girls in cross-generational relationships have limited power to resist pressures to agree to unsafe sexual practices (Luke and Kurz, 2002). Abstinence before marriage may not be a successful strategy for these girls, because they marry early and their older husbands may already carry the virus. From a very early age, many young women experience rape and forced sex. For example, 20 percent of all young girls interviewed in Kisumu, Kenya, and Ndola, Zambia, said their first sexual encounter involved physical force (Glynn et al., 2001). Similarly, around 25 percent of 15–24-year-old girls in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, said they had been ‘tricked’ or ‘persuaded’ into their first sexual experience (Manzini, 2001). Violent or forced sex can increase the risk of transmitting HIV because forced vaginal penetration commonly causes abrasions and cuts that allow the virus to cross the vaginal wall more easily. Church Response: Income-generating activities in Democratic Republic of the Congo in partnership with The Presbyterian Church of Kinshasa (CPK). Learn more. Women in Kinshasa created more than 3,000 bags for General Assembly 217 participants. Income-generating activities like this enable women in Congo the opportunity to make enough money to support their family — which can help prevent them from turning to prostitution as a means to survival. A three-minute video about this project is available for download.


	Women in Southern Africa struggle against HIV Quick Facts Worldwide, there are now 17 million women and 18.7 million men between the ages of 15 and 49 living with HIV/AIDS, mostly in developing countries. Young women now make up more than 60 percent of those 15-24 years old who are HIV/AIDS positive. Globally, young women are 1.6 times more likely to be living with HIV/AIDS than young men. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region most disastrously affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic — with 23 million adults now infected, 57 percent of them women. Young women aged 15-24 are three times more likely to be infected than young men. 77 percent of all HIV positive women live in sub-Saharan Africa. — Presbyterian Washington Office first quarterly report, 2005



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Women and girls

Women in Southern Africa struggle against HIV

Quick Facts