11.30.04
by Richard Ingham
Agence France Presse
The “ABC” campaign — which advocates abstinence, being faithful to one partner, or using condoms — has come under fire from leading AIDS activists ahead of World AIDS Day. Critics of the strategy — a central component of President Bush’s $15 billion, five-year commitment to fight global HIV/AIDS — say it is frequently ineffectual, sometimes hypocritical and a potential threat to life.
The abstinence message is unworkable in African countries where HIV and sexual activity are rampant, said Mary Crewe, director of the Center for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria. “In countries where there are very high levels of sexual activity around, with social dislocation, family breakdowns, sugar daddies, with young people bored and with nothing to do, to suddenly come in and say you should stop having sex is absolutely ludicrous,” said Crewe. “ABC is a middle-class, middle-aged response to an epidemic, all overlaid with a kind of morality that doesn’t hold anymore.”
ABC can place lives at risk, said Crewe, citing women who face coercive sex from an infected husband or young girls pressured into marriage or coercive sex with an older, infected man. The problem, said Crewe, is not abstinence, fidelity or even condoms, but rights, legal protection, female empowerment, poverty and education. World AIDS Day’s theme this year stresses the vulnerability of women and girls to HIV.
“Our experience, in sub-Saharan African countries especially, is that abstinence-based prevention strategies have a great deal of difficulty in taking hold,” said Sean Healy, spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders.
In an effort to heal the divisive rift, a group of leading figures last week appealed for ABC to be allowed “an important role” along with other anti-AIDS initiatives. South African archbishop and Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni were among those supporting the appeal.