Report says patriarchal society, gender violence contributing to spread of HIV/AIDS

Women, lacking power, resources and education because of Tanzania’s patriarchal society, are bearing the brunt of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the East African country, the Tanzania Media Women's Association (TAMWA) reported this week. Despite ongoing activities and debates aimed at tackling the spread of HIV/AIDS, the roots causes of the problem are not being properly dealt with, many HIV messages are out of context and current attitudes are not conducive to reversing spread of the disease, especially among women, Ananilea Nkya, TAMWA's executive director, told IRIN on Friday. "Unless women have power, resources and education, this situation will not change," she said. "Women are accepting these things becuase they don't have the resource power [money] but also the power and influence that society gives to men." "We have now established that many women keep silent about their HIV status, not becuase they want to, but because they know that they will be thrown out of the family house if they admit to being HIV positive," she said. She added: "Men don't want to be associated with HIV so they blame women, despite the fact that many of the infections are brought into marriages by philandering men." "Unless we are able to address this stigmatisation of women, all other efforts might be in vain," she said. Over the course of the last two months, TAMWA interviewed 90 women in Temeke, Ilala and Kinondoni districts in Dar es Salaam and this week they published a report titled "Gender Violence in Relation to HIV/AIDS". Many respondents spoke of being abondoned by their husbands and brandished as "having brought AIDS to the family" after disclosing their HIV positive status. However, when their husbands were unwell, women said that society expected them to work hard enough to care for them and feed the rest of the family, the report found. "My husband was deranged after learning of my status and accused me of infecting him. He later abondoned my daughter and me and married another wife," Haruka Mohammed, one of the interviewees, told TAMWA. "To rub salt into the wound, family members abondoned me too. I had to beg to survive and cater for my children. I later turned to well wishers and other societies that assist people living with HIV," she added. Nkya said that the present reality was the result of an unequal power balance and it was "time to break the silence". "A lot of women are dying in their marriages because they can't afford to leave. They have nothing to fall back on," she said. According to figures from the National Aids Control Programme, she added, HIV infections were high within marriages, accounting for half of all HIV positive Tanzanians. The most recent figures for HIV prevalence in Tanzania, issued by the Tanzanian Commission for AIDS in 2002, estimate that 9.6 percent of the population are HIV positive. TAMWA said that change could only be brought about if people "with the power and the resources" were committed to tackle these fundamental issues. The media could also contribute, but it needed the support of organisations with specialists in the relevant fields to pass on accurate information that could be relayed to the public, TAMWA reported.