Patriarchal Traditions Spur Spread of HIV in North

MediaGlobal (New York)

Apophia Agiresaasi

6 June 2011

After getting married at 18, Alice Ongom, 45, settled down in Gulu, a northern Ugandan city that was home to much of the bloodshed during the country’s civil war. But after giving birth to five daughters, her in-laws worried she couldn’t give her husband a male heir.

“All my in-laws hated me and told my husband to chase me away,” Ongom says. “He did not chase me away, but instead he brought in another woman.”

After his second wife fell sick and Ongom lost three sets of twins, Ongom says she suspected that her co-wife was suffering from AIDS and that her husband had transmitted HIV from her co-wife to her. Ongom took an HIV test and found out she was HIV-positive.

Ongom says the problem started at home, as her culture’s patriarchal traditions place so much value on boys that they disregard girls.

“I should not have got married at 18 years,” says Ongom, who dropped out of school in grade seven. “I should have been in school. My dad refused to pay school fees for all of my siblings because we were girls.”

She says it’s a cycle.

“My mother had been accused of bearing only girls and chased from her matrimonial home,” she says. “We grew up with our stepmother.”

Uganda has one of the highest populations of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, according to international data. Because of poverty and pregnancy, just 7 percent of girls attend secondary school, according to the Ministry of Education. Just 32 percent of young women and 38 percent of young men in Uganda have comprehensive knowledge of HIV, according to UNICEF.

A 2008 report listed northern Uganda as having the country’s second-highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate, according to the Program for Accessible Health, Communication and Education, PACE, a local organization.

Paula Kyomukama, a women’s rights activist in Gulu, says that many girls are taught that they can’t achieve anything without a man. She says they rush into marriage to escape the social stigma of being unmarried here, leading to sexual

intercourse at young ages and the spread of HIV.

Almost double the percentage of men and young men here had comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS compared with their female counterparts, who do not receive much schooling and demonstrated less HIV/AIDS knowledge than most Ugandan women, according to the latest Uganda Demographic and Health Survey, UDHS.

The PACE report attributed the high rate of HIV in the area to the 20-year insurgency in the region starting in 1986 by the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, a rebel group. More than 1.6 millions Ugandans fled their homes, and about 30,000 children were abducted, according to the U.N. LRA rebels terrorized anyone perceived to be sympathetic to the government by cutting off their body parts and forcing children to be soldiers or sex slaves, according to Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization.

“HIV prevalence in northern Uganda is higher than the national average because of the insurgency,” says Dr. Zainabu Akol, manager of the AIDS Control Program, set up by the Ministry of Health. “People were made to live in camps, and sex became the only source of entertainment.”

Scanty water in internally displaced person, IDP, camps also led to long lines and night trips to the boreholes, or wells, says Muzaaya Geofrey, manager of the Gulu branch of The AIDS Support Organization, TASO, a nongovernmental organization.

“The more time they spend at the borehole, the more they get exposed to acts that expose them to HIV,” he says.

Geofrey says that a lack of education and push toward early marriages by parents – and by women who wanted a man to protect them during the war – also led to a higher frequency of HIV transmission.

“Many children born during the war did not go to school,” he says. “They are now adolescents. Parents are marrying them off to get favors or money.”

Akol says there are many organizations working with HIV/AIDS in northern Uganda. One is TASO.

“Before I joined TASO, I had contemplated suicide,” Ongom says. “I wanted to kill myself and poison my children because I had lost hope.”

She says TASO has provided counseling to help her to stop hating herself and free

antiretrovirals, ARVs, which cost about 250,000 Ugandan shillings, $105 USD.

“It was burdensome to raise that money,” she says. “We had a group in which we would contribute for each other money to buy ARVs.”

Akol says the government also requested a special project in northern Uganda, leading to Northern Uganda Malaria, AIDS and Tuberculosis program, NUMAT, set up in 2006 by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a U.S. government agency.

Still, women’s rights activists say more needs to be done to deconstruct patriarchal traditions and educate and empower women in northern Uganda and nationwide.

First published by the Global Press Institute. Adapted for MediaGlobal readers. http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/uganda/patriarchal-traditions-and-war-pave-way-spread-hiv-northern-uganda

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