Women living with HIV
From the editors
This issue of Exchange focuses on some pressing concerns of women living HIV and AIDS. An overview article written by guest editor Emma Bell of ICW (International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS) together with her colleague Luisa Orza highlights some of these concerns. One of these is the balancing required by positive women to be able to manage the fears instilled by their positive status (of infecting one’s loved ones, of being stigmatized and discriminated, of abandonment and violence, etc.) with the need for security and support and the desire for intimacy, love and children.
Another concern is the lack of recognition of sexual and reproductive rights of women living HIV. Some of the topics addressed in other articles in this issue are the much-discussed ABC approach to behaviour change and how that ignores complex issues like human needs and desires; the loss of property and land experienced by many women living with or affected by HIV and AIDS in India; and the approach of ‘memory work’ with mothers living with HIV and their children as developed by NACWOLA in Uganda some ten years ago.
3 | 2006 | English