ICW Resources

ICW submission to the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Population
Development and Reproductive Health hearings on maternal morbidity.

Summary 

Article abstract - In 1994, at the Paris AIDS summit, 42 nations declared their support for the principle of Greater Involvement of People Living with or Affected by HIV and AIDS – which came known as the GIPA principle. Although these governments acknowledged that this principle is critical to ethical and effective national responses to the pandemic, the views and voices of HIV-positive people still tend to be overlooked or ignored.

In 2006 three African clinical trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, in which HIV negative men were circumcised, were disbanded when preliminary results indicated that the circumcised men were up to 60% less likely to become HIV infected after sex with an HIV positive woman than the men who were not circumcised.

What happens to HIV positive women if and when the use of ‘gender’ obscures rather than illuminates lived realities and our collective struggle for human rights?

This Vision Paper came about as a result of PozFem UK’s involvement in the Strategy Review of the UK’s National Strategy for Sexual Health and HIV, and accompanies our formal input to that process. However, it has far wider relevance. It documents concerns and recommendations raised by members of PozFem UK on the basis of our personal experiences and illustrates these with quotes from PozFem UK meetings, as well as ICW and Positively Women’s publications. We hope it will serve as a useful advocacy tool for HIV positive women around the UK.

A monitoring tool on access to care, treatment and support, sexual and reproductive health and rights and violence against women created by and for HIV positive women, updated 2006.