In August, the Global Aids Alliance released a report, Zero Tolerance, that outlines the impact of violence against women and girls on the fight against HIV/Aids. AllAfrica's Margaret McElligott spoke to Communications Director David Bryden about his perspective on this week's UN reports on violence against women and children, and the role of the UN system in defeating HIV/Aids.
One of the first parts of the Global Aids Alliance's response to the report on violence against women focuses on the influence that the new secretary-general will have. Have you had a chance to start researching Ban Ki Moon? What role do you think he will play?
He seems to be a consensus candidate. He does not have a reputation as a bold leader on the issues that were addressed in our report and that came out this week at the UN. Maybe that's something that as he settles in as the new secretary-general and begins to exercise his voice on this issue we'll start to see that greater leadership come out. Kofi Annan's shoes are going to be hard to fill, but that's what we need. We need someone of that level, that stature and that willingness to challenge donors to do what needs to be done and to challenge the world in the way that Kofi Annan did on HIV/Aids.
It's hard to say how the new secretary-general will be, but he doesn't have a reputation as someone likely to do that. We're hoping that we're proved wrong on that point and we're ready to be proved wrong.
Another thing that you call for, and it echoes statements that Steven Lewis, the UN secretary-general's special envoy to Africa on HIV/Aids, has made, is the creation of a new UN women's agency. What keeps a new UN women's agency from being marginalized in the UN community or underfunded the way that you write that Unifem has been?
That's a good question. I'm not sure anyone has a clear answer. Steven Lewis's office actually issued a paper outlining why this agency was important. It was a pretty impressive paper laying out the kind of authority that this agency needed to be effective. I'm hoping that if it is established, and it looks like it may be from what I've heard, that it has that level of authority and level of funding that he called for because one of the things that the report identifies rather clearly is that programs at the UN have not been as well-coordinated as they should be. There are some overlapping mandates and that may be alright, but it's just that we need to see coordination of all the efforts on this. It needs to be elevated to a much higher political status – the issue itself – and the importance of acting not just on violence but on other issues related to women as well.
In terms of estimating the global resources needed to combat violence against women, who do you think should come up with that estimate?
I think that what we've seen already is that UNAIDS has developed a level of expertise of estimating resource needs for particular problems and going even beyond narrow issues of prevention and treatment and looking more holistically at issues of doing their own resource estimate on HIV/Aids - they include a number of things that are actually applicable for this problem as well in terms of training and education at a national level. We think that UNAIDs would be an appropriate agency to undertake that kind of study. WHO obviously has an important contribution to make here as well, so it's probably something that would need to be a collaborative effort. But I was surprised that the report didn't explicitly call for the development of that kind of estimate.
Are you familiar with the various programs working directly with men to combat violence against women?
Yes, there's some really exciting work being done by NGOs. You're talking about the group in Kenya?
Right, and South Africa and a couple other places.
Yes, I think it's critically important and I'm really excited about what the Men in Red are doing in Kenya. I think that's the kind of thing that men really need to get on board with - these kinds of programs – and get involved at the local level, at a national level. Because when you do, as men who care about this issue, who understand what it is, what we need to do is exemplify a different approach and really make sure that through peer pressure [we] convey the importance of this to men who are out of line. The solution isn't only empowering women – obviously that's an important solution – but it's also taking men to a higher level of understanding about this.
What are some of the issues girls face in school?
The whole situation affecting particularly girls, but also boys to some extent, in schools in Africa is just horrific. We have some really striking statistics from Malawi where as many as half of all girls are reporting sexual abuse in the public schools. It's a problem that really does need to be addressed. We've got abuse coming from fellow students and we've also got abuse coming from teachers. There's a real need to weed out the teachers that are not behaving responsibly through legal action and also through prevention through training.
The Safe Schools program is something that the U.S. Agency for International Development has pioneered. They've done a needs assessment in a number of countries. It's only operational though in two countries, so it's moving pretty slowly. They've also done a needs assessment in Ethiopia and Jamaica but nothing's actually underway in terms of programs in those countries. It's something that really needs to be sped up. They do teacher training, they conduct workshops to talk through these kinds of issues, [and] they have different kinds of manuals which they've produced.
We also have just basic infrastructural problems where children may have a long way to walk to get to school. They also may be on a long bus ride with a bus driver who will take advantage of his position. He's got access to some money, being a salaried employee, so that can make him attractive as a sugar daddy to some girls who are in real need of school fees. These issues all go together.
Even if you look at something as basic as lavatories - we don't necessarily have something as basic as lavatories with doors. And we don't necessarily have single-sex lavatories, so we may have boys and girls going to the same lavatory. There are situations which make girls vulnerable in these schools,and there is a real drive, not only in Africa but in the world, to get all children in school, to get them the access to education that they deserve. That's a goal that the UN has signed on to as one of the Millennium Development Goals and there's an important initiative for the British government on that as well. But at the same time we need to make sure that the schools are safe for all children to be in.
The other thing is corporal punishment. and it's controversial in some settings regarding the value of corporal punishment, but all the academic studies that we've seen suggest that it's not effective and that it shows the child that a physical response is a way to solve a problem. That's not the kind of example that we need to show to children. Corporal punishment can be pretty extreme in some countries, so that's something we really need to look at: whether that's the appropriate thing. The UN report that came out this week on children really made that clear. They call for an end to corporal punishment and that's something that we support as well.
When you were working on Zero Tolerance, how much willingness was there in national education departments to talk about sexual violence in schools ?
That's a good question. We did not do a lot of interviews of that kind, so that's something that we still need to do. What we had done was collect available research that had already been done by a number of observers and experts on these different issues. So we didn't figure out to what extent that they are willing to admit it the problem.
It's obvious that in Malawi there's a problem based on the statistics that I gave you and so it's encouraging to see that there is a USAID program there active in 40 schools already. There are some positive things happening. Even on the broader issues of violence, there are some positive examples of governments starting to take action on violence against women and violence against girls. For instance, now in Tanzania there's an impressive effort to train judicial officials and judges at various levels of authority, so thats encouraging. There have been some important legal reforms in the DRC. The South African government is providing a one-stop center for women who have been affected by violence, and sexual offenses courts are an important innovation there too. Some good things are going on. What was interesting to me was how frank the report that came out this week on violence against women was in terms of being very clear that efforts to date have been grossly inadequate.
You were surprised by that frankness?
I was, because the UN is a creature of member states. It's sponsored by member states and in effect this report is criticizing a number of member states. It took real issue with a number of traditional practices that are prevalent in a number of African countries. It took issue with religious fundamentalism in the post- 9/11 environment. There were some statements in the report that I thought were bold and that was valuable.
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Coming back to your first question, [with] the next secretary general, the jury is still out on that. I happen to think that that's an important question, but we would also need to look to major governments including the U.S. and other G8 governments – how are they going to prioritize this within their own assistance programs? How will they integrate this concern? It also comes down to the individual, the individual man, how he sees the world. He needs to take responsibility for this and make it clear that this is something that has to stop. One upcoming opportunity that's exciting is White Ribbon Day – it's actually mentioned in the report – when men and boys are encouraged to wear a white ribbon to symbolize their rejection of violence against women.
Is there anything else that you think people should know about the report or about the relationship between Aids and violence against women?
One of the things that I wanted to say was that this issue would be important even if it didn't have any connection with HIV/Aids, but it often does. There's just no way that the world is going to meet the goals that we've set on HIV/Aids unless we take violence on, and really address it with a fully funded response. That's something I think that we have to make clear when we're talking about HIV/Aids.
We have governments like the U.S. who have really decided to invest significant resources now in fighting HIV/Aids, but our view is that that effort is not going to succeed unless this aspect of violence is fully addressed. Because if there is violence, or the threat of violence, a girl or woman is much less likely to be able to negotiate safe sex, to get tested [or] to reveal her status. It's a real issue. But the other thing that's important to recognize when we start talking about these things is that it does sound like a problem that's so big that it would be impossible to address. That was why in the report itself it was encouraging to see they identified some strategies that are really working.
And in Zero Tolerance, too.
Yes, we really did. If you look at microenterprise programs, for instance, you can point to some real results in terms of lessening violence. It's about taking the culture to a new place. It can be done. Culture is not an immutable thing.
