Bush praise for Uganda AIDS policy raises interesting Qs

Sofia wrote:

But educating Americans about safe sex is easier than educating tribal, rural Ugandans. Yes. It is proven by statistics. [..] Either scenario proves: it is easier to convince Americans to abstain from risky sex than the tribesmen from jungles and savannas

Actually, one could well argue the very opposite - especially in this thread! Didnt this thread start out with some impressive statistics on this, after all? If we are to believe the Washington Times:

Quote:

AIDS prevalence among pregnant women - the universal yardstick for determining the transmission rate of AIDS in a population - was 21 percent in 1991. By 2001, it had dropped to 6 percent.

In 1994, more than 60 percent of Ugandan boys ages 13-16 reported being sexually active, a number that dropped to about 15 percent in 1996 and 5 percent in 2001. Among girls, the shift was equally dramatic.

Most significantly, the number of men reporting two or more partners in a year dropped from more than 70 percent in 1989 to between 15 percent and 20 percent in 1995. The number of women reporting multiple partners dropped from 18 percent in 1989 to 2.5 percent by 2002.

Meanwhile, the use of condoms in high-risk groups rose to the highest level in Africa.

"Young people were [losing their virginity] at a later age. Ugandans were having fewer partners. Significantly fewer people were getting other [sexually transmitted diseases]," a key risk factor for contracting HIV, said Mr. Green, the Harvard anthropologist and one of the primary authors of a monograph on the USAID Web site called "What Happened in Uganda?"

Seen anything like this successful a result of an AIDS prevention campaign in the West? Figures that concern a change in five, ten years' time? Apparently, it is very possible to "educate tribal, rural Ugandans" about this - both about behavioral change and about safe sex - not easy, it never is, but not, apparently, any more hopeless an effort than in any "civilised" country. "It is proven by statistics." ;-)

So, if the problem apparently is not that it is, by supposed facts of civilisation, harder to educate Africans about AIDS prevention than it is to educate Americans about it - then the million dollar question remains, how did the figures get so high in the first place?

Suggestion: because there was a lack of education in the first place? To paraphrase what you said in the bit that I [..]'d out of your quote, above: AIDS swept Africa, because Africans were long not being educated about AIDS transmission?

When AIDS erupted in the eighties, we here in the West had huge campaigns, almost instantly - from when I was in high school, we've all been force-fed the mantra of safe sex safe sex safe sex.

In comparison, AIDS remained a taboo subject in many African countries untill deep in the nineties, as far as I know - when people were already dying by the bunch. Hell, even now Mbeki is thwarting AIDS campaigns by insisting there might be "another explanation for the disease". In other countries the authorities are still hardly helping, either.

The reluctance of the authorities was reinforced by strong superstitions and distrust among the population - distrust of condoms, the belief that condoms were 'unmanly' - hey, we've heard that nonsense here back in the 80s too - and even when the authorities were trying to educate, there was the distrust of authorities that got in the way.

Even when "condom education" finally got underway, there's practical problems - as a Dr Hearts in the WT report notes, "In Africa, people cannot get clean water and aspirin. How are they going to get condoms consistently?"

And if you are hungry and disease of many kinds lurk everywhere, how are you going to suddenly care about this particular danger enough to spend your little money on condoms?

I can't help stressing, again, that none of these factors have anything to do with "levels of morality and conscience".

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Question number two: why are campaigns that are taking place elsewhere, failing still as well?

Again, even I - and I'm hardly an expert - can come up with a great many reasons that have little to do with standards of morality and conscience, or levels of civilisation, or the nature of living a barefoot jungle tribesman kind of life.

The Ugandan example struck me because its so obviously a concerted effort of all those concerned. The government takes a leading, full-force role - rare, still, in Africa. They've gotten the Christian and Muslim religious authorities to not thwart the message about condom use. The schools are informing children from age very young on. NGOs do the rest - and here's where we remember that in many other African countries, its all up to the NGOs.

Uganda itself currently is - mostly - pacified in terms of political violence. In many other countries, violent conflicts have torn apart the fabric of government (as well as society as a whole). Try setting up an effective campaign in a state of anarchy.

And let us take a look at the foreign "help" in the matter. In the countries where AIDS support is up to (I)NGOs and the like, you are faced with many of those being religious organisations - who'll go out and warn against safe sex, undoing the work of their colleagues.

And, fair enough, take a look the other way around, too. With Dr. Hearst's remark in mind, its fair enough to observe that only passing condoms around isnt ever going to be a durable solution - its different from raising awareness among adventurous youngsters in Amsterdam, who can find a condom machine on every corner.

In fact, that trick in the WT article where they implied that the exclusive focus of Western organisations in Africa on condoms actually expressed a kind of ... racism, really - i.e., that it expressed an assumption that you cant educate Africans into behaving more monogamously, anyway, cause thats just the way they are - I dont know if its a fair accusation, but it did make me think. The more people think like steissd, the greater the chance that the epidemy keeps on expanding unchecked, I think.

And, talking the role the West has or could have - the reason so many more Africans are not just getting HIV-infected, but also getting actual AIDS and then dying from it, is because of the lack of medicine, and the state of health in general. The step from HIV-positive to AIDS patient is greatly accelerated by the combination with other diseases, undernourishment, low immune system. Furthermore, here, the numbers of those dying have stabilised because of the new effective medicine cocktails. There, such medicines are mostly unaffordable still - because the medicine producers in the West refuse to let go of the profits they're making - why isnt generic medicine made available much more widely? The Bush admin has a very bad track record in facilitating this - it should change its way.

So, you see - the stuff about levels of civilisation, morals and conscience is a red herring. Theres all the stuff above - if anyone still, instead, jumps to the, 'its cause they're more primitive' kind of line - then I think one can safely assume heavy prejudice, if not conscious bigotry outright.

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I also hope that with these two new posts up here (sorry about merely copying previous posts earlier), I'll have steered the discussion a little bit back into the original direction.

(I know, everybody's free to digress - I love to digress myself. But it wouldnt be nice if it seemed that the only interest we can find in discussing the Africans' plight with AIDS, is the point where we see our 'at home' debates - about PC, etc - mirrored, would it now?)

I also hope that I will never again see two people whose views I deeply respect fall into merely yelling at each other in a thread of mine ... I mean, Craven, I counted fifteen times "stupid" in your posts up here. C'mon!

(OK, you get to call me stupid now. <grins>. If only for immediately undermining my own attempt to get the discussion back on topic again). Cool

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nimh wrote:

When AIDS erupted in the eighties, we here in the West had huge campaigns, almost instantly - from when I was in high school, we've all been force-fed the mantra of safe sex safe sex safe sex.

I can underline that heavily since I was one of those, who did that job.

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nimh-- I am so sorry I got so off-track. The digression, IMO, had very little to do with your original idea. I didn't get upset during the whole thing. That is generally how Craven and I communicate. :wink:

--------
I agree with one of your assertions that education was botched by many African leaders. I applaud Uganda's success, and I'm glad Bush highlighted it.

I watched the HBO series Pandemic, with great interest. AIDS is sweeping India and Russia. Affordable meds is a great problem--but again, education seems to be thwarted by those in charge not wanting their epidemics to be reported.

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I overuse the word stupid. It's just a stupid thing I do. :-) But I am no fan of digression so I too would like to help this get back on topic.

I think it's always interesting to see which AIDS campains actually work, as opposed to which AIDS campaigns seem like trying to stem the tide with a teacup.

I think nimh bring up a very relevent point about getting the religious parties to play alonga nd not sabotage the attempts.

Brazil is a very Catholic country and birth control is, in some ways, a taboo. Abortion is illegal and such, yet the religious leaders do not try to curb the sex education (well, to be fair Brazil is just about the most sexed culture there is, sex is rarely equated with sin there).

In Brazil the key factors were some of the elements nimh mentions. There was an all-out effort. Not just a small program but a concerted effort.

Brazil has done this with several health issues and they are an amazing example.

In the case of Brazil, one main factor was their defiance of the US in the WTO.

Brazil decided that if they couldn't pay for AIDS medicines it was not a good enough reason to let people die. So they produced generics and when the US threatened they told us to bring it on.

The US looked very bad and dropped the issue.

Having worked with the pharmaceutical industry (I used to teach many people in this sector and have prepared many documents for Pharmacia/Pfizer) I sympathyze a bit with the amount they spend on research etc but Brazil took what could ahve become an AIDS epidemic of African proportions and dealt with it.

I credit the all-out nature of the campaign, the lack of interference from the religious sector and the willingness to face down the US on the generic medicine issue as crucial to their efforts.

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Sofia wrote:

education seems to be thwarted by those in charge not wanting their epidemics to be reported.

From my own practise, I know, how important this education is.

I don't know the actual situation in India and Russia - if they don't educate their because they want to hide the reports, I mean.

I can only speak about the situation from the mid-eighties onwards in my homestate (~20 million inhabitants with great metropoltan as rural areas).
No-one wanted to hide statistics. But education was strongly hindered in conservative Catholic areas, while the Protestants were extremely co-operative. (I often made courses in Protestant parish houses, rarely in Catholic ones and the Muslim youth was either educated in schools or in state/county/community youth centers).

This is not just the view for a small county but for the whole state (since I later co-ordinated this).

Former students, now parents themselves, still remember what we did in those times. And I'm sure that this helped a lot to minimize the risques of infection.

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The direct effect of the AIDS epidemic is shocking enough in itself. The examples are well-known, but the stats keep shocking me.

"In Zimbabwe, for example, a 15-year-old boy in 1983 had just a 15% chance of dying before reaching his 50th birthday, compared with a 50% chance for a 15-year-old boy in 1997 [..]. In Botswana, 90% of girls and 88% of boys who turned 15 in 2000 are projected to die of AIDS at current risk levels. In Zimbabwe and South Africa AIDS will cause the deaths of nearly three-quarters of males now age 15" (The Consequences of Inaction).

"If it were not for Aids, the number of people dying at the age of 15-34 in South Africa would be dropping slowly. Instead, it has more than doubled and is expected to reach nine times its 1980 level." (BBC News: Africa Aids Crisis)

But apart from the immediate explosion of death, what freaks me out is the prospect of its impact on tomorrow's society in Africa. It leads to an immediate economic collapse - those who'd work the land are sick or dead - which in turn will exacerbate poverty and thus, the impact of the illness itself and the social destabilisation it comes with - a vicious cycle.

And it also annihilates the very human and social resources that would be able to help stem the tide: "In Zambia in the first 10 months of 1998, an estimated 1,300 teachers died - two-thirds the number of new teachers trained annually [..] In 1999 an estimated 860,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa lost their teachers to AIDS" (The Consequences of Inaction).

And what about the generation that grows up? "Before Aids struck, countries such as Botswana were prospering, with an average life span for its people of almost 75 years. But [now] 39% of adults have the HIV virus, which will kill them within nine or 10 years unless they receive expensive western medicines. Those who are dying are the breadwinners and teachers - the sexually active generation in their mid-20s to mid-40s. Vast numbers of children are being orphaned: so far, 14 million in the world have lost one or both parents to Aids. Whole countries' economies are being wrecked." (The Guardian: Aids cuts life expectancy to 27). "UNAIDS estimated over 880,000 children below 14 years orphaned by AIDS in the country, constituting about 51% of all orphans of that age. Preliminary results from an on-going action research study reflect that communities perceive orphan care among the greatest burdens of the epidemic." (Uganda AIDS Commission).

A doubling of the number of orphans, while at the same time the impact of AIDS mean there are fewer resources than ever - both in the village community and on the level of public/government care - to take care of these orphans. What will they grow up to be?

When the Russian civil war broke out, one seemingly side-bar element were the bands of teenage orphans roaming around the country. Not a few of them were recruited into the various armies, or constituted rogue armies themselves. Wholly apart from feeling pity for them - nothing is more destructive to a civil society's social fabric than massive groups of disrooted, embittered lone youths roaming around, doing whatever they need to do to survive. In Russia, the NKVD (the KGB's precursor) ended up recruiting among them, and later from the orphanages - since these youths, loyal to noone, hardened by a life, governed only by the law of the jungle, that had taken them beyond any sense of pity or empathy, turned out to be the ideal footsoldiers for Stalin's terror.

With life expectancy dropping to little over thirty, ten to fourty years less than it was a decade ago, an entire generation will grow up without parents, uncles or grandparents - without elders - or at best caring for them in their dying days. The erstwhile figures of authority in a community will now be - dead. The transfer of values, skills, traditions from generation to generation will be abruptly abrogated.

"As more and more adults die of AIDS, younger and younger adults would become responsible for managing government, including such key services as civil security, the courts, education, and health care". Younger and younger adults who would, at the same time, be decreasingly prepared for the job, since, "often, children must leave school to care for a dying parent or relative. Because AIDS consumes family budgets, fewer funds remain available for children's education [..] In Uganda, following the deaths of one or both parents, the chances of children going to school is cut in half, and young people who attend school spend less time there than before." (The Consequences of Inaction).

What will that, in turn, do to the stability of African countries - how much further will the patterns of failing, fragmenting states, incompetent government and random violence exacerbate when its this emerging "lost generation" that will inherit the continent?

Shocked

(See also allAfrica.com: Top AIDS Headlines)

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Walter,
I need to retract. The Pandemic special I watched focused on one family, and the young Russian man stated that the Russian epidemic centered on drug use--and it was part of his opinion that the Russian govt was not doing their job in educating the public about the epidemic, due to their desire to lessen the impression of just how severe the drug problem there is.

I went to read further to examine his assertion, and did not find evidence that it was factual. I was reading UNAIDS material.

I did find horrific, frightening statistics, such as nimh has shared above.

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Don't we all remember the shared needle for drugs being blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS? But that's only one issue of many concerning AIDS. Many babies are born with AIDS. c.i.

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True, ci. The Russian problem seems to center on sharing infected needles.

The implications of those incredible numbers, as nimh's post alludes to, are devastating--even if a cure is found tomorrow. It is a generational catastrophe, which will have far-reaching global demographic affect.

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Sofia, That's the reason AIDS is a international problem that requires all to contribute in some way to help eliminate this disease. I have regular contact with a physician in Tanzania, and even though the drug companies are trying to reduce their prices to those African countries, it's still too expensive for many to take advantage of them. Even at less than $1 per pill, that's more than many earn in a day. c.i.

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You are right, again, ci.
The Pandemic special that focused on the Indian family was wrenching.
The infected husband and wife wanted to have a baby.
They found a way to afford the pills that would lessen the baby's chances of picking it up in vitro--
But, viewers witnessed the health care provider telling the man the cost of the pills to ward off worse symptoms, and he explained he had to borrow money for the trip to the clinic--just to get his T-cell count. There was no way he could afford the meds that would prolong his life.

She then said--"think positively." It gave me a chill.

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One slight silver lining, at least, in all this. Hopefully, the solutions that are being developed to face the AIDS crisis will also lead to a substantial emancipation of women's position in society.

I was struck by where, in the Wash. Post article, it was described how little girls were educated about the danger of "sugar daddies", women were encouraged to resist the men, even relatives, who tried to pressure them into having sex (without condom) with myths and threats, and how discussion was promoted about "everything from masturbation to myths about virginity and the effects of poverty on sex".

At the moment, women are hit especially hard by the AIDS crisis. And from what I gather, this has a lot to do with their position in society.

"[W]omen's lower status in society may contribute to disproportionate HIV infection rates. Women's lower status may prevent them from having control of their sexual relationships. For example, studies on women's first sexual experience show that over half of young women in Malawi and over 20 percent of young women in Nigeria experienced forced sexual intercourse." (Advocates for Youth fact sheet)

The strange thing seems to be that this disadvantaged position has as much to do with the change in social structures that came with modernisation, urbanisation, etc, as with any traditional subjugation of women in village/tribal culture.

The latter does play a role, of course, for example where poligamy is involved, or inversely, where sex is shrouded in a culture of shame and silence. (And this appears to still be overwhelmingly the case, belying the warnings American conservatives insist on making about the suggested unfettered distributing of condoms ... "one study showed that less than 50 percent of youth in Madagascar and Nigeria know about contraception. [..] Many African health services workers feel it is inappropriate to provide contraceptives to adolescents, often making it difficult or impossible for youth to obtain condoms [..] For example, a study in Kenya found that three-fourths of family planning workers were unwilling to provide contraceptives to young women who had not given birth. [..] In sub-Saharan Africa, as in other regions of the world, a culture of silence surrounds most reproductive health issues.")

But it seems to be the uprooting that was involved in the socio-economic transformation of the last decades that has created the conditions for the epidemic to spread so drastically. And this question is inextricably linked with the question of impoverishment (remember, in Nigeria for example, the percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day went up from 27 to 73 since 1980):

Quote:

In many countries young women, lacking opportunities, seek support from men, trading sex - and thus the risk of contracting HIV infection - for security. The risks are greater when the men are older. In Tanzania, for example, where growing poverty has made traditional marriages more difficult to arrange, young women compete for the attention of older men, who are better established than young men and thus more attractive as potential husbands. Often, this practice is driven by parental expectation of financial support from their children. [..]

Although the motivations for this are complex, young women sometimes enter into relationships with older men - called "sugar daddies" in sub-Saharan Africa - who pay their school fees, buy them gifts, and offer other inducements. [..] A few studies report similar arrangements between young men and older women, as in Cameroon and South Africa, where some young men have "sugar mummies".

Economic hardship and civil unrest have pushed more and more young men and women away from home and into towns and cities to look for work. Many enter multiple sexual relationships that carry risk for HIV and thus transmit the virus from one place to another. Female migrant workers - many of them unmarried girls in domestic or seasonal work - are often sexually exploited. Poverty and lack of alternatives also are major reasons that many children become sex workers

(Why so vulnerable - Poverty and deprivation (Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health)

Perhaps a key element to Uganda's success is not even so much either promoting abstinence and faithfulness or distributing condoms - its about empowering women. And a lot of the current AIDS prevention campaigns should greatly increase women's empowerment. In Thailand, "Interventions have included workshops for women on negotiating condom use with their partners, self-help groups and life-skill education." (Population Action International. PAI, btw, mentions Senegal as well as Uganda as a country where the epidemic was successfully curbed, as "aggressive condom & condom education and prevention campaigns have successfully slowed the spread of HIV" there - link). The Washington Times article noted:

"Sophia Mukasa Monico, a Ugandan who is the senior AIDS program officer for the Global Health Council in Washington, said that with the ABC campaign, Ugandans, especially women, changed.

"Women had to take responsibility for their own lives. Wives told their husbands to be faithful, use a condom, even in marriage, or there would be no sex. Many women in Uganda had celibate marriages or moved out on their own," said Mrs. Mukasa Monico. She said that today 60 percent of Ugandan women live on their own or provide for themselves."

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nimh, As you point out, many of us in the west are ignorant of the dynamics that goes on in other cultures, and the reasons why HIV/AIDS are spread. I read an article about a year or so ago about how older men take advantage of young girls by force, and get them infected. I'm not ready to sit in my comfortable adobe, and even attempt to suggest solutions for problems I have no inkling of it's varied problems. c.i.

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Gosh.

Was just invited here by nimh, who thought of me while writing about women's empowerment. I'm flattered. I think. Wink

Hadn't seen this before, read through all 10 pages... yowza. Did anyone start a thread to address the "PC" digression? 'Cause I have some things I want to say, but will hold on that.

At some point something nimh said made me write down "Dan Savage AIDS", and while I know what that note meant I don't remember at this point exactly what sparked it. At any rate, Dan Savage, author of Savage Love, wrote a scathing commentary on the "gutless wonders" who work in HIV/AIDS.

Quote:

When I read Freeman's story [in Rolling Stone about "bug chasers"], I didn't think that the now-infamous "25 percent" stat was the most shocking quote in it. To my mind that honor goes to Daniel Castellanos, assistant director of community education at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York. Castellanos was asked if he would attempt to talk someone out of trying to catch HIV. "If someone comes to me and says he wants to get HIV," Castellanos replied, "I might work with him around the why.... But if in the end that's a decision he wants to make, there's a point where we have to respect people's decisions."

While active "bug chasing" may only account for a handful of new infections in gay men, the inability of HIV/AIDS educators to aggressively challenge gay men surely accounts for a large chunk. Since the arrival of effective treatments for HIV, gay men in urban areas have been busily re-creating the kind of sexual subcultures that laid out the welcome mat for HIV in the 1970s. The infection rates of HIV and other STDs are soaring and--who knows?--perhaps some unknown STD is gaining a toehold in urban gay scenes, just as HIV did in the '70s. And at the same time that the infection rates of HIV and other STDs are rising among gay men, the education strategy in vogue at GMHC and other AIDS organizations is this: We must respect the decisions gay men make--up to and including the decision to get infected with HIV for shits and giggles. That strategy seems as bizarre as it does ineffective.

Perhaps it's time for GMHC and other AIDS groups to start telling gay men the truth. Taking stupid sexual risks--even if risk turns you on--is reckless; anal sex on the first date--even with condoms--is a bad idea; giving someone HIV--even if he wants it--is immoral; being a huge ******* slut--as popular as that might make you--has physical and emotional consequences.

So long as AIDS educators refuse to challenge gay men, HIV infection rates will continue to rise. That's the real scandal, CTD, not the link on Drudge or the story Freeman wrote or the ineptitude of Rolling Stone's editors.

Whole column:

http://www.thestranger.com/2003-01-30/savage.html

Others have already commented on the obvious, that a range of options is the way to go. If not this, then that. If not that, then the other. I do think that both "sides" of the debate here are terrified of giving ground -- just because there are absolute idiots who work in HIV/AIDS doesn't mean that abstinence-only education is the way to go. Just because abstinence-only has abysmal success rates doesn't mean that abstinence has no place at all in the tool chest.

I think that the empowerment of women in Uganda is an extremely important point, and also points to why the problem is much more complicated here. It is less lack of education, lack of options, as willfully ignoring the dangers and hoping for the best. It's playing the lottery, or that hoary cliche, Russian Roulette. I think it is much less about pure education.

Which doesn't mean that education can't be used, anyway, especially in terms of changing the culture, of not telling the young man who wants to get AIDS that that is his decision. Just, I think the situations are different in fundamental ways.

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sozobe wrote:

Was just invited here by nimh, who thought of me while writing about women's empowerment. I'm flattered. I think.

LOL! Ehm, yeh, consider it flattering ;-).

sozobe wrote:

At some point something nimh said made me write down "Dan Savage AIDS".

Re: what Savage wrote, here in Holland HIV infection rates have gone sharply up again the last year or two, three, after a decade of stabilisation. People are talking of "condom fatigue" (meaning pple tired of using them, not pple wearing lots of them to remain invisible when undertaking warfare in a condom jungle).

Now that medicines have finally been found that broke the equation AIDS=immediate death, the sense of acute urgency/doom about it has gone, or something, and use of condoms has immediately gone down, especially among gays. But also overall - unsurprising perhaps considering how little inroads the disease has made among heterosexuals in the end. The doom scenario isnt working anymore for them.

Problem is especially big among the children of immigrants - the sex education campaign hasnt reached them as effectively as it has white kids, and teachers may actually have taken a step back in attempts not to offend the Muslim etc kids in their class. So its time for a new offensive.

But ... all thats on a digression, yet again. (Damn, nimh! <giggles>)

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That seems pretty on-point to me, in terms of how useful the Ugandan model is here. I think we face very similar problems to what you describe. I do think that more education is warranted, and a comprehensive, multiple-choice program that could be implemented across the board sounds good.

I think we have weaknesses when programs are too far towards A or C, which can be corrected with education. By "education" I mean just plain facts (you can get AIDS even if you wear a condom) as well as more subtle cultural aspects (don't internalize oppression by actively or passively seeking to contract AIDS.) While I think we have a largish percentage of people who know the facts but take risks anyway, I don't want to suggest that everyone knows these facts -- in-depth, accurate, non-prudish sex education is certainly necessary.

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sophia wrote:

Gautam-- You wrote this--
Ever since I read on a thread (I cant remember where), him saying "I can avoid AIDS as long as I dont have sex with men", any such statement from him, reeks of bigotry for me.
*******
That would have been a great time to educate someone. I'd hate for someone to think that (above) would keep them safe from AIDS. A lot of patient explanation and correct information is what generally changes people's minds about some, incorrect, closely-held opinions.

I find it funny that in this day and age people think only gay men get aids !! Specially when it is someone as articulate and knowledgable as Steissed !!

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Quote:

I was struck by where, in the Wash. Post article, it was described how little girls were educated about the danger of "sugar daddies", women were encouraged to resist the men, even relatives, who tried to pressure them into having sex (without condom) with myths and threats, and how discussion was promoted about "everything from masturbation to myths about virginity and the effects of poverty on sex".

I have a (maybe radical, maybe offensive) thought. I think part of the problem might be that there might be an attitude that the man can have sex whenever he wants - he's the man. In lower-class America there is an all-too-often still prevalent attitude: My woman, my property (Also the one not really talked about much: My daughter, my property) Spousal rape and father-daughter incest happen. They're a reality. Fortunately, but slowly - although we take it for granted now - those attitudes have changed. Those things are no longer considered "family secrets" (or family prerogative) - they're considered things that are wrong and not to be tolerated. We no longer warn our girls against "dirty old men" - we arm them with information, and tell them to respect their bodies. And we have let men know that they are NOT allowed to do whatever they want with their children, their wives - other people's children and wives. These things came, through an evolutionary process - to be accepted in our society as ... the way things are.

I can also see how - if this IS part of the problem - that it might be part of the solution - to accept this and have it out in the open. "The only sex should be consensual sex", kinda.

I guess this is a class issue, not a race issue. Which is why I'm comparing urban and rural lower-class Africans with urban and rural lower-class Americans (a demographic group with which I am intimately acquainted).

Some would bring the "primal urges" argument in here - but I won't. I will however, say specifically that's NOT what I'm talking about.

I see it as a natural progression of society - a society where men and women are equal - one is not the other's victim. Maybe - and that was my QUESTION, actually - maybe Africa's not there yet? (And "Africa" is, of course, WAY too broad a generalization.) And I'm just wondering - because you have these girls learning SONGS to protect themselves with. Obviously, there is something going on that warrants such a need. I see it as being about learning, not DNA. About enlightenment.

I think soz is right about empowering women - I think it really helps. It's just something I was thinking about - if PART of the solution will come about as a natural consequence of the women's movement, sex education, the fight for children's rights. Isn't it sad that the people who should be spreading the word are going to be too sick to do it?

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Bush praise for Uganda AIDS policy raises interesting Qs

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