Women and HIV - Part 3

Socio-Economic Vulnerability

Socio-economic vulnerability is based on gender inequality:

• Cultural and social norms often restrict women’s access to basic information about sexual and reproductive health.
• Even where women have access to this information, they may be unable to negotiate safer sex or the use of condoms in relationships as a result of gender norms that prescribe an unequal, passive role for women in sexual decision making. Marriage does not protect women from HIV infection. More than four-fifths of new infections in women occur in marriage or in long-term relationships with primary partners.
• Women are often economically dependent on their husbands or partners and fear rejection and/or violence if they insist on condom use or abstinence, or disclose their HIV status.
• Practices such as “dry sex”, “widow cleansing” and female circumcision add to women’s vulnerability.
• Because women are traditionally perceived as care-givers the “burden of care” that the HIV epidemic has created more frequently falls to women than men.
• Women and young girls may use sex as a commodity in exchange for goods, services, money, accommodation or even status. This transactional sex ‒ more often than not with older men ‒ is especially prevalent in sub-Saharan and Zimbabwe.