Gender-Based Violence Also Impedes Zambian Women's HIV Treatment - and the National Assembly Should do Something About it.

by Nada Mustafa Ali, PhD Africa Researcher at the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch alin@hrw.org

I would like to commend Mr. Mwanamwaba's and the Zambia National Assembly's emphasis on the links between gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. Gender-based violence not only increases women's vulnerability and inability to protect themselvs from unsafe sex, it can also impede women's ability to access and continue using life-saving HIV treatment. Research that we conducted in Lusaka and the Copperbelt provinces in Zambia earlier this year revealed clearly how violence against women within the household, as well as women's insecure property rights such as property grabbing and the possible loss of property upon divorce under customary laws clearly obstructed the ability of many women to benefit from Zambia's HIV treatment programs.

It is good that the speaker of the National Assembly is stressing the need to strengthen the laws on gender-based violence; and the National Assembly should translate this into action by passing a specific law that tackles sexual and gender-based violence as the provisions in Zambia's criminal law is inadequate to tackle sexual and gender-based violence.

Women's rights organizations in Zambia have been campaigning for several years now toward legal reform and a specific law on gender-based violence.

Zambia also needs to introduce specfic measures in the health system, especially in healthcare facilities providing HIV treatment, so these facilities can detect and respond to gender-based violence and the way it impedes treatment.

Of course, this should be part of an overall stratey to address gender inequality in Zambia.

Nada Mustafa Ali