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Mandisa Mbali,
"Women in South African AIDS Activism:
Towards a Feminist Economic and Political Agenda to Address the Epidemic"
(page 4 of 8)
2) Violence against women: A driver of new infections and a
barrier to women's leadership in AIDS activism
South Africa is a country with a very high rate of intimate partner
violence. Kristen Dunkle et al. have demonstrated that women with
violent or controlling partners are at a greater risk of H.I.V.
infection (2004). Women AIDS activists have also been vulnerable to
violent gender-based attacks for openly revealing their H.I.V. status;
therefore, it remains a serious barrier to women's exercise of vocal
public leadership in activism around the epidemic.
As has been well documented, in December 1998 a woman activist from
the National Association of People Living with H.I.V./AIDS (NAPWA) named
Gugu Dlamini was publicly murdered in KwaMashu, Durban, a month after
revealing her H.I.V. status on Radio Zulu. A bungled investigation
rendered a successful prosecution impossible; however, an inquest into
her murder, which was held only after vigorous advocacy by the AIDS Law
Project (ALP), revealed that the suspects were heard by neighbors to
accuse Dlamini of being a prostitute who had infected people with H.I.V.
shortly before her brutal murder.[1]
Dlamini's experience is far from isolated. For instance, Promise
Mthembu, who is now the global advocacy officer for the International
Community of Women Living with H.I.V. (ICW), has stated that she has
also experienced gender-based violence as a consequence of her activism.
Mthembu was diagnosed with H.I.V in 1995. Five months after her
diagnosis, she joined the National Association of People Living with
H.I.V. (NAPWA) and began to speak out about living with H.I.V. in public
meetings. Because of her H.I.V. status, her first child was stillborn,
and her partner blamed her for infecting him with H.I.V. (Mthembu,
undated). He began to beat her, and her speaking out about living with
H.I.V only compounded the abuse. Writing about her own story, Mthembu
said that her partner:
became more and more angry with me for attending AIDS
meetings and giving talks about my personal story. He was jealous of my
meeting other people who are H.I.V-positive, saying that I cared for and
supported other people at his expense. My life became an endless circle
of beatings and unprotected sex, especially if he was drunk. I could not
take it any longer and I left him, despite the cultural disgrace and
shame that it caused (Mthembu, undated).
The gravity of the issue was also demonstrated when TAC activist
Lorna Mlofana was murdered after revealing her H.I.V. status to her
perpetrators following a multiple-assailant sexual assault in
Khayalitsha Township, Cape Town, in 2003. The successful prosecution of
the perpetrators of the murder only came about after vigorous organizing
by the TAC in the community.
As Walsh points out, civil society has often been conceptualized in
the theoretical literature as separate from the "private sphere" of the
family. However, family obligations and gendered problems in the home,
such as intimate-partner violence, can act as a barrier to women's
public political participation (2009). In addition to outright violence,
Walsh points out that the "private sphere" impacts women activists'
performances of their "public" roles through their experiences of the
following problems: sexual harassment within their organizations, the
"double shift" of unpaid housework at home and paid work for civil
society organizations, and inconvenient meeting times after hours when
public transport is less safe for women (2009). This is in addition to the
fact that organizational sexism means that women have more limited
experience and skills to make them eligible for promotion, and there is
frequently a lack of institutional support for them in the rare
instances when they do ascend to leadership positions (Walsh 2009).
Ironically, given that AIDS activism is at least in part aimed at
ending new infections, sexual harassment has occurred in AIDS activist
organizations in South Africa. In 2005, one woman told us that in her
organization, "To get a hired position, you must sleep with the male
supervisor . . .. If you break the relationship, you will be harassed until
[you have] to resign, leave the job and go back home to die" (interview,
April 26, 2005). Such relationships are clearly coercive and unethical
in a context where women are more likely to experience difficulties in
finding an alternative livelihood, and where the power imbalances
inherent in such sexual relationships could make it harder to negotiate
consistent and correct condom usage.
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