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World AIDS Day – ring a bell?

1 December 2005

Bells will ring out to mark World AIDS Day today and New Zealand will join in the chorus of 1,000,000 bells pealing in collective resonance around the world to raise AIDS awareness. The Bell is Ringing is a global campaign to unite communities around the world in commemoration of the ongoing struggle against HIV/AIDS and to express solidarity with those living with HIV and mourn those who have lost their lives to AIDS.

Family Planning Association Executive Director, Dr Gill Greer said people who wanted to take part in the campaign were to ring a bell – even a bicycle bell - for 60 seconds at 9am on Friday 2 December.

The Bell is Ringing is just one of the awareness raising campaigns currently under way to call people’s attention the suffering produced by HIV/AIDS and that other sinister syndrome, universal violence against females.

November 25 saw the start of a worldwide campaign, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. The 16 days will focus on the link between HIV and violence against women and girls, encompassing the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, World AIDS Day and Human Rights Day. 

Dr Greer said if AIDS rings a bell at all, many of us in New Zealand will think about it only as a disease associated with gay men. We might even give a passing thought to AIDS as a disease also associated with intravenous drug use, prostitution and haemophilia.

“We may also tell ourselves that the spectre of AIDS is not something we really need to concern ourselves with, as long as we’re not gay, not drug addicts, sex workers or haemophiliacs. We may even convince ourselves that the presence of AIDS in the world is just another problem for Africa. But the reality is HIV/AIDS increasingly respects few borders – geographical, sexual or social. The centre of the pandemic is shifting to Asia and the Pacific, and New Zealand is part of the Asia Pacific region. In the Pacific, HIV/AIDS threatens to take a deadly hold, and the overwhelming majority of those now being infected are infected heterosexually.

“If we think about AIDS on World AIDS Day – or any other day - we need to think about the way HIV can travel, by boat, by plane, by truck, on foot, through jungle, across deserts, over mountains, across oceans, through tourism, friends, partners, or through a one night stand. Worldwide, heterosexual transmission is increasing.”

Just under 50 per cent of the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide are female, with young women aged between 15-24 three times more likely to be infected with HIV than men of the same age. Only 42 per cent of all people at risk of sexual exposure to HIV are able to access condoms, and Dr Greer says women and girls are further denied the right to negotiate condom use, through gender inequality, poverty and violence.

“To be young, female and poor in the world greatly increases the risk of dying of AIDS. We should think about HIV/AIDS and its partnership with violence against women, particularly young girls. We should acknowledge that through rape, beatings, coercion, enslavement, trafficking, forced prostitution, and forced marriage, sex can be used as a weapon against women and young girls, and HIV/AIDS is the bullet.”

Dr Greer said violence against women was one of the most outrageous and pervasive human rights scandals of our times.

“Every day, in every country, women and girls are beaten and sexually assaulted, often by those closest to them - husbands, fathers, brothers, cousins, and friends of the family.  The consequences are numerous, and sometimes fatal.

She says when we think about AIDS on World AIDS Day, we need not to be in denial.

“Instead of judging, we need to recognise that, worldwide, a crisis is taking place. Bird flu may be coming, but HIV/AIDS is here. We need to think about treatment and - even more - about prevention. We must educate the young about condom use, and about the way gender discrimination disempowers women and contributes to the global epidemic. We need to think about what should be – but isn’t - a basic human right, like the right to universal access to sexual and reproductive health services and information. Utilising family planning and the full range of reproductive health services effectively will provide far greater opportunity for prevention and screening, both for HIV and for violence, than has occurred in the past.”

Dr Greer said this was recognised at the conclusion of the United Nations 2005 World Summit in September, where the largest ever gathering of world leaders resolved to achieve universal access to reproductive health, in order to reduce HIV and maternal mortality, eliminate poverty, promote gender equality, and end discrimination against women and girls by the year 2015.

Did you know that every minute around the world...
•	one woman dies from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
•	10 teenage girls undergo an unsafe abortion.
•	13 infants under 12 months die
•	57 people catch an STI
•	11 people are infected with HIV
•	the population increases by 150 people

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