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HIV
WOMEN AND GIRLS : RAPE AND HIV IN AFRICA

South Africa has 2,3 million women and girls aged 15 to 49 infected, according to UNAIDS, and 95 000 children under the age of 14. It has 420 orphans.

Girls are far more likely than boys to be coerced or raped, according to UN AIDS (June, 2000) or to be enticed into sex by someone older, stronger or richer. Sometimes the power held over them is mainly that of greater physical strength. Sometimes it is social pressure to acquiesce to elders. In a survey of 1 600 children and adolescents in four poor areas of Lusaka over a quarter of children aged 10 said they had already had sex, the figure rose to 60% among 14-year-olds. In SA 10% of respondents in a study in six provinces said they started having sex at age 11 or younger.

In 7 of 11 studies from UNAIDS (June 2000) more than one woman in five was infected with the virus; a large proportion of them will not live to see their 30th birthday. Close to 6 out of 10 women in Carletonville tested positive for HIV.

A study in Zambia showed that fewer than a quarter of women believed that a married woman could refuse to have sex with her husband even if he had been demonstrably unfaithful and was infected. Only 11% thought a woman could ask her husband to use a condom in those circumstances.

In Nairobi, Kenya 30% of women aged over 18 said they had been sexually abused, as had one-fifth of teenage girls but the vast majority took no action. Of 16 cases of rape reported to police and/or the local chief in a six-month period action was taken in only five cases. In Botswana - where the rape of girls under 16 rose 65% between 1997 and 1998 - over two-fifths of all rape cases that reach the courts involve girls under the age of 16. In 1997, a fifth of reported rape cases ended in a conviction and three-quarters of the convicted rapists were given a prison sentence of four years or less.

In Harare, Zimbabwe, an average of 77 sexually abused children a month came to a clinic at the Family Support Trust, the number rose to 99 - over half the children were under 12 and over 300 were under five, the youngest was just a few months old.