Women, sex and disability - a triple taboo - article
From the Accra Daily Mail comes this article on attitudes towards sexuality and women with disabilities in African countries. Most of these attitudes and discriminatory behaviours are common to women with disabilities in every country in the world, though. And even though as a woman with a disability and an advocate and activist none of this is surprising to me, it still stabs me in the guts to be reminded yet again how horrifically we are treated, how little we are valued, because we are women and because we have disabilities.
Some times it feels like I’m bailing out a sinking ship with a teaspoon trying to combat these sorts of attitudes. :-(
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Women, sex and disability - a triple taboo
| Posted: Friday, June 16, 2006
Sexuality is still a taboo topic in many societies - and the taboo is even greater for people with disabilities.
“Parents and relatives believe that a woman with disability should not engage in sex”, says Gladys Charowa, founder member and Executive Director of Disabled Women Support Organisation (DWSO), a single mother who has been living with disability since injuring her spinal cord in a car accident in 2001.
It is not quite so bad for disabled men, she points out: “They can easily find a partner and marry through assistance from relatives. Women are being denied this right by parents and relatives.”
As a result, some sleep with any man, to get away from their parents. Others are taken advantage of by men, playing on the women’s need to be wanted and loved. Many are raped precisely because of their vulnerability: their disability may make it difficult for them to get away or fight off attackers or, in the case of mental impairment, to understand what is happening. Ugandan disability activist Patrick Kirumira cites the case of a blind primary school pupil in the country’s Luwero district who was raped by two “boda-boda” (motorcycle taxi) boys and became pregnant. They may have gambled on her inability to identify them.
All this is bad enough, but unfortunately, is just the surface of the problem. Indian disability activist Kuhu Das says that research shows that almost 90 per cent of disabled women experience sexual abuse, exploitation and violence from the very people who are supposed to be helping them - care-givers, close relatives and family members.
Sexual partners are also often abusive. Kirumira says that because people with disability feel they have fewer chances of a relationship, they tend to stay with a partner even if he is violent or takes many other partners. A Save the Children Fund survey in Uganda and Rwanda found that young disabled people felt they were less likely to have a faithful partner than their non-disabled peers, and “many felt they should be grateful” to non-disabled partners.
A girl in Rukungiri, western Uganda, told Kirumira that her partner comes after dark and has warned her that if she ever reveals his identity it will be the end of the relationship. “They now have a child; she cannot make any demands or reveal the identity to anybody, not even her best friend, for fear of losing him.”
Other representatives of disability groups echo that experience. “What is acceptable in the community is for a disabled person to marry another disabled person so that together they share their curse”, says a disabled local councillor in Uganda.
To add to the already harrowing problems of discrimination and abuse in sexual matters comes the risk of HIV and AIDS.
If you are raped, or have little choice in sexual partners, or have no power in a relationship - which is the experience of huge numbers of people with disability - you run a greatly increased risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
Abusers may also deludedly believe the myth that sex with a disabled women cures AIDS, or perhaps think that disabled women don’t have sex and therefore will not be infected with HIV.
Disabled people are less likely than others to be informed about HIV and AIDS, even in societies such as Uganda where public information campaigns are widespread. Because they are seen as unlikely to have sex they often miss out on traditional sex education; because they are often illiterate, they may not be able to read publicity material; because they are often poor they may lack access to (or may be unable to hear or watch) radio and TV.
It’s hard enough for men. Kirumira tells of a disabled man who approached a village health team for a packet of condoms and was asked, “What do you want to do with them? Has someone sent you for them?”
Rather than risk further mockery and humiliation, the man chose to do without a condom. The difficulty experienced by a man in such circumstances can usually be multiplied many times for a woman.
And Charowa and Kirumira agree that if someone with a disability becomes HIV-positive, discrimination triples.
Disabled women face double discrimination, says Charowa: “First and foremost as women, secondly as women with disabilities. It is still worse if a woman has disability and is HIV positive. This means this person is being discriminated against three times over.”
HIV and AIDS organisation are rarely willing to work with people with disabilities, she says. There is no readily available information in Braille or sign language at Voluntary Testing Centres. No provision is made for the blind to read the instructions on condoms.
The triple discrimination she cites is the reason why so few people with disabilities join Uganda’s post-test clubs, set up to encourage people to accept and deal with their HIV-positive status and to avoid spreading the virus: it is a kind of social support system. Kirumira says that in over eight years working with the clubs in both rural and urban areas, he has met only two people with disability who are members.
To avoid yet further hostility, people with disabilities who also have AIDS frequently avoid getting treatment, including antiretrovirals (ARVs).
“They may choose to suffer and die quietly than come out and expose themselves to humiliation and stigma,” he says.
It’s a similar story in Tanzania. Philemon Rujwahula of the Association of the Disabled told a recent international conference in Dar es Salaam that people with disabilities were excluded from the country’s national HIV/AIDS policy, reinforcing the perception that they were social misfits. He called for a new approach.
It is a bleak picture, and of enormous importance, both for the individuals concerned but also for international efforts to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Minal Doshi, an Indian activist who is a leading a campaign to get disability acknowledged as a key factor in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the UN-backed global poverty reduction programme, says that “given that an estimated 10 per cent of the world’s citizens are disabled, the AIDS crisis cannot be addressed successfully unless individuals with disability are routinely included in all AIDS outreach efforts.”
Change will take a long time, says Gladys Charowa, but at least the issues are coming out into the open and disabled people’s organisations have started trying to educate their communities about sexuality matters.
The additional discrimination and disadvantage experienced by women with disabilities cropped up in a series of international round-table discussions on disability and poverty organised by Healthlink Worldwide, a London-based international NGO, and partners as part of the UK Department for International Development’s Disability, Knowledge and Research Programme (Disability KaR, http://www.disabilitykar.net, which aims to foster Southern research on disability).
In Uganda, the AIDS Service Organisation (TASO) has gone beyond words and trained a female counsellor with a disability to encourage people with disabilities to seek services.
Similarly, Kuhu Das says that although disabled women have had to struggle to take part in the international women’s movement, “slowly but gradually non-disabled women are being forced to think about the issues of disabled women as ‘women’s issues’.
”NGOs, governments and other groups and organisations have begun to recognise that disabled women and girls are in an alarming situation. What they are doing is negligible compared with the need, and a lot of consciousness-raising is required.“
But it’s a start.
Ends
Some times it feels like I’m bailing out a sinking ship with a teaspoon trying to combat these sorts of attitudes. :-(
--------
Women, sex and disability - a triple taboo
| Posted: Friday, June 16, 2006
Sexuality is still a taboo topic in many societies - and the taboo is even greater for people with disabilities.
“Parents and relatives believe that a woman with disability should not engage in sex”, says Gladys Charowa, founder member and Executive Director of Disabled Women Support Organisation (DWSO), a single mother who has been living with disability since injuring her spinal cord in a car accident in 2001.
It is not quite so bad for disabled men, she points out: “They can easily find a partner and marry through assistance from relatives. Women are being denied this right by parents and relatives.”
As a result, some sleep with any man, to get away from their parents. Others are taken advantage of by men, playing on the women’s need to be wanted and loved. Many are raped precisely because of their vulnerability: their disability may make it difficult for them to get away or fight off attackers or, in the case of mental impairment, to understand what is happening. Ugandan disability activist Patrick Kirumira cites the case of a blind primary school pupil in the country’s Luwero district who was raped by two “boda-boda” (motorcycle taxi) boys and became pregnant. They may have gambled on her inability to identify them.
All this is bad enough, but unfortunately, is just the surface of the problem. Indian disability activist Kuhu Das says that research shows that almost 90 per cent of disabled women experience sexual abuse, exploitation and violence from the very people who are supposed to be helping them - care-givers, close relatives and family members.
Sexual partners are also often abusive. Kirumira says that because people with disability feel they have fewer chances of a relationship, they tend to stay with a partner even if he is violent or takes many other partners. A Save the Children Fund survey in Uganda and Rwanda found that young disabled people felt they were less likely to have a faithful partner than their non-disabled peers, and “many felt they should be grateful” to non-disabled partners.
A girl in Rukungiri, western Uganda, told Kirumira that her partner comes after dark and has warned her that if she ever reveals his identity it will be the end of the relationship. “They now have a child; she cannot make any demands or reveal the identity to anybody, not even her best friend, for fear of losing him.”
Other representatives of disability groups echo that experience. “What is acceptable in the community is for a disabled person to marry another disabled person so that together they share their curse”, says a disabled local councillor in Uganda.
To add to the already harrowing problems of discrimination and abuse in sexual matters comes the risk of HIV and AIDS.
If you are raped, or have little choice in sexual partners, or have no power in a relationship - which is the experience of huge numbers of people with disability - you run a greatly increased risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
Abusers may also deludedly believe the myth that sex with a disabled women cures AIDS, or perhaps think that disabled women don’t have sex and therefore will not be infected with HIV.
Disabled people are less likely than others to be informed about HIV and AIDS, even in societies such as Uganda where public information campaigns are widespread. Because they are seen as unlikely to have sex they often miss out on traditional sex education; because they are often illiterate, they may not be able to read publicity material; because they are often poor they may lack access to (or may be unable to hear or watch) radio and TV.
It’s hard enough for men. Kirumira tells of a disabled man who approached a village health team for a packet of condoms and was asked, “What do you want to do with them? Has someone sent you for them?”
Rather than risk further mockery and humiliation, the man chose to do without a condom. The difficulty experienced by a man in such circumstances can usually be multiplied many times for a woman.
And Charowa and Kirumira agree that if someone with a disability becomes HIV-positive, discrimination triples.
Disabled women face double discrimination, says Charowa: “First and foremost as women, secondly as women with disabilities. It is still worse if a woman has disability and is HIV positive. This means this person is being discriminated against three times over.”
HIV and AIDS organisation are rarely willing to work with people with disabilities, she says. There is no readily available information in Braille or sign language at Voluntary Testing Centres. No provision is made for the blind to read the instructions on condoms.
The triple discrimination she cites is the reason why so few people with disabilities join Uganda’s post-test clubs, set up to encourage people to accept and deal with their HIV-positive status and to avoid spreading the virus: it is a kind of social support system. Kirumira says that in over eight years working with the clubs in both rural and urban areas, he has met only two people with disability who are members.
To avoid yet further hostility, people with disabilities who also have AIDS frequently avoid getting treatment, including antiretrovirals (ARVs).
“They may choose to suffer and die quietly than come out and expose themselves to humiliation and stigma,” he says.
It’s a similar story in Tanzania. Philemon Rujwahula of the Association of the Disabled told a recent international conference in Dar es Salaam that people with disabilities were excluded from the country’s national HIV/AIDS policy, reinforcing the perception that they were social misfits. He called for a new approach.
It is a bleak picture, and of enormous importance, both for the individuals concerned but also for international efforts to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Minal Doshi, an Indian activist who is a leading a campaign to get disability acknowledged as a key factor in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the UN-backed global poverty reduction programme, says that “given that an estimated 10 per cent of the world’s citizens are disabled, the AIDS crisis cannot be addressed successfully unless individuals with disability are routinely included in all AIDS outreach efforts.”
Change will take a long time, says Gladys Charowa, but at least the issues are coming out into the open and disabled people’s organisations have started trying to educate their communities about sexuality matters.
The additional discrimination and disadvantage experienced by women with disabilities cropped up in a series of international round-table discussions on disability and poverty organised by Healthlink Worldwide, a London-based international NGO, and partners as part of the UK Department for International Development’s Disability, Knowledge and Research Programme (Disability KaR, http://www.disabilitykar.net, which aims to foster Southern research on disability).
In Uganda, the AIDS Service Organisation (TASO) has gone beyond words and trained a female counsellor with a disability to encourage people with disabilities to seek services.
Similarly, Kuhu Das says that although disabled women have had to struggle to take part in the international women’s movement, “slowly but gradually non-disabled women are being forced to think about the issues of disabled women as ‘women’s issues’.
”NGOs, governments and other groups and organisations have begun to recognise that disabled women and girls are in an alarming situation. What they are doing is negligible compared with the need, and a lot of consciousness-raising is required.“
But it’s a start.
Ends