NEWS
TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND AIDS

NEW YORK TIMES, June 6, 2000.
UNITED NATIONS (AP)

Trafficking in women and the devastating impact of AIDS on women and girls have become the hottest new challenges for 180 nations trying to accelerate an international agenda to achieve women's equality. Women's rights activists spoke about the two problems at a U.N. meeting this week aimed at reviewing progress since the 1995 Beijing women's conference and producing a strong final document that pushes things forward.

"The issue we are dealing with right now is whether or not these governments are going to recognize that both the epidemic and trafficking are driven by men's demands for sex,'' said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called trafficking "a worldwide plague'' and said he will ask world leaders at the Millennium Summit in September to launch an international campaign to reverse the spread of AIDS, which is killing tens of thousands of young mothers, especially in southern Africa. First lady Hillary Clinton declared that "the face of AIDS today is increasingly female,'' creating a generation of AIDS orphans. And she said it was time to speak out "on behalf of the one million trafficking victims who, every year, are being bought and sold into modern slavery.''

Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, said gender inequality -- including women's economic dependence on men -- is a fundamental driving force of the AIDS epidemic. "Slowing down the spread of HIV means important changes are needed in relationships between men and women,'' Piot said. "Men have a crucial role to play in bringing about this kind of radical change.'' In Africa, women infected with the HIV virus now outnumber men, she said, "and that's not because women are promiscuous, and it's not because they're ignorant of the disease or what have you, it's because men have sex with any number of women -- and they bring it back to their wives.'

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