VOA News - AIDS Worsens Violence Against Women

VOA News - AIDS Worsens Violence Against Women: "���Up to 30 percent of women in the world report that their first sexual experience was forced or coerced. That means they���re not choosing to lose their virginity. They���re actually experiencing that loss of a precious choice by violence. In some places more than half of school children experience sexual or physical violence while they���re at school at the hands of their classmates or their teachers. And some studies have found that women who experience violence are up to three times more likely to acquire HIV than women who do not."
(..)

"We go through violence in peace time. We go through violence in conflict. And we go through violence in post conflict situations.”

She says the ABC approach to AIDS prevention, Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms, does not work when a woman is raped.

And as for the hope of an effective microbicide, which would help women protect themselves from HIV during sex, Wandia asks:

“How am I going to be able to have time to use the microbicide if somebody is raping me? How is a small girl going to have time to use microbicides when she’s facing violence on the way to school, when she’s facing violence in school?”

She says the violence continues even after the rape. For example, thousands of women who were raped and infected with HIV during the 1994 Rwandan genocide are shunned by their families, disinherited and lack access to any property.