(Un)declared wars
As if it was not enough that women are being discriminated against in almost every aspect of society already, now most of the world's media are waging an undeclared war on women who are victims of AIDS.
Instead of serving to enlighten and expand the public's awareness about the AIDS virus and epidemic, I find with more and more frequency that the world's media have made AIDS an issue of guilt vs innocence. In many ways it's not being treated like a disease that has reached epidemic proportions but rather like a crime being carried out against men and children, by women.
Women, and in particular women of colour, are the fastest growing HIV group. In a 1990 survey, women accounted for 25% of the world's HIV infections. Now they account for 40% of all reported AIDS cases. It is expected that by the year 2000, women will account for the majority of the world's AIDS cases (source: AIDS in the world 1992, ed. Mann, Tantola and Netter).
Conclusive evidence clearly shows that the accelerated rise of full blown AIDS among women can be directly attributed to the fact that women are 10 times more likely to be subjected to HIV transmission via heterosexual sex with an infected partner, than men are (The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of Women and AIDS, by Gena Corea).
For example, a study in the northern regions of Thailand revealed that 70% of all prostitutes who had worked for more than a year in busy brothels were HIV-positive. In the US, when various media sources report on the spread of HIV among prostitutes, the non-discerning listeners, viewers and readers are left with the misguided impression that sex industry workers — most of whom, the world over, are women — have a greater potential for spreading the disease than for catching it. When media sources are not disseminating that kind of sexist misinformation, they are focusing on women infected with AIDS who pass their infections on to their unborn children. The misleading information implies that men do not spread the disease.
Such reporting reduces women to little more than diseased pariahs, while taking the pressures off of governments' inadequate research on development of a cure for the disease. Since few if any women own and operate the world's media, it would be foolish to think women are being characterised in this fashion accidentally. Such characterisations can be officially deadly.
In Burma 25 women were found — shall we say — "guilty" of AIDS, and as a consequence were given fatal injections of cyanide by Burmese health officials (Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1993). There is an undeclared war being waged against women with AIDS, inside the declared war against the disease.
While most countries don't treat HIV- and AIDS-infected women as inhumanely as Burma, as world citizens we have to admit that the reporting about the 25 women the Burmese health officials murdered was kept too quiet. Moreover, I didn't see a single newscast about that government's sanctioned mass murder. In some parts of the US, you couldn't even find newspaper accounts of the atrocity.
That was no accident, in my opinion.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]