In Her Own Words: Violations of Women's Human Rights and HIV
August 14, 2006
XVI International AIDS Conference
Toronto, Canada

Remarks by Sophie Dilmitis and Lynde Francis

Available in Word and PDF

Sophie Dilmitis: Thank you. Being a young woman from Zimbabwe, where do I actually begin to discuss the human rights violations that have occurred in my country? Where do I begin to talk about the silent voices of women? And I am not just talking about tables like this or at tables where decisions that directly affect them are made. I am talking about in their lives in general. Being able to enjoy their human rights and speak openly about what they need and what they want.

Because I live with HIV and because I saw the yawning gap between what young people were being told and what they were being given, in 2001 I started the youth prevention program called Choose Life.

A couple of years into the project I wanted to train other young people to continue the work that I had begun. And I had a meeting with some representatives of the Ministry of Education and I was told that it is against policy for anyone who does not work directly for the government to talk to young children in schools, let alone to show them how to use a condom.

And really, they are only being given one prevention message—if anything—and that is abstinence. Yet, when we talk about abstinence, for how many women is this actually a reality? With the infamous government operation cleanup over two thousand accessible outlets in rural areas distributing condoms were demolished, along with homes and livelihoods. And a reason why abstinence is failing young women is because it does not allow them the opportunity to address issues around their sexuality and reproductive health. We know that in most cases young Zimbabwean women marry older men, so the very thing that we are telling them to do-abstain and be faithful-is the very thing that is placing them at special risk of contracting HIV. Most sexual education and HIV and AIDS awareness in schools in Zimbabwe is not youth friendly or realistic and does not address their needs, especially the needs of young women. And further to this, their lack of access to health care services that they need.

In addition to this, there are very few educational programs in Zimbabwe that are realistic at addressing youth issues. One such program is "Auntie Stella," which is based on a chat column, and it is supported by Training and Research Support Centre. And the only way that TARSC can ensure that this program is implemented, is that when teachers are trained they put in part of the budget for their training. And this also goes to show how the government is not supporting teachers in implementing HIV and AIDS educational programs.

It would almost be acceptable for them to keep civil society out of schools if they were doing some kind of education themselves, but nothing is happening. The only way that I was allowed into the schools is that I made an agreement with the heads of schools that if I was found out that the onus would not end up on them for letting me into the schools.    

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Thank you. I am so curious about your country and its AIDS issues, primarily because of the turmoil in it. That was very enlightening. Thank you very much. Lynde…

Lynde Francis: I would like to add one thing, in that Sophie and I represent two ends of the scale of women infected by HIV in Zimbabwe. I am a grandmother of seven and she is my second daughter. Her mother accepts that I am her second mother [laughter]. Sophie and I are still the only two white women in Zimbabwe to have gone public with our status and yet there are hundreds and hundreds of white women who are positive, but they are still closeted because of the history of racial tension in Zimbabwe and in some ways the racial privilege that we have. I would like to ask Sophie to tell you a little about her own experience. Sophie started Choose Life because she herself was a victim of the very substandard kind of education that she got in youth school and I would like you, Sophie, to tell us a little bit more about what led you to try and intervene in that way.

SD: Young people in schools don't have any information. When I was 15, we had a health care worker come into our school to talk to us about HIV and AIDS and she showed us a book of people who were dying of AIDS and, literally, the people in the book…there were pictures of people's body parts that were rotting. And her prevention message to us was, don't sleep around because if you sleep around this is what's going to happen to you. It was not a prevention message that I could relate to at all and when I started talking to young people about what it's actually like to live with HIV I saw that they were able to relate and that kind of made it real. And I think young people-not only young people, I think in all of us—there is an engrained belief that things like this do not happen to people like us. So prevention is actually an extremely difficult thing to do.

LF: Yes, and I can tell you that Sophie's program has had an amazing effect on my program which is called The Centre, and as a result of Sophie's Choose Life program, we now have a very active youth group called Teen Spirit. They are all positive youngsters aged 16 to 25 and they have been trained in the Choose Life program and trained in some advocacy skills so that they can go out and talk to in and out of school youth.

Sophie, when you started training the Choose Life with the positive youngsters at The Centre it was quite a new experience for you. You were a white teenager and all the people you were talking to were African women.  Tell us something about how that felt and what it was like to do that.

SD: I think the fact that I am HIV positive made the racial barrier easy to deal with and I felt very included. I remember the one experience that I had—and I hope given the fact that I have just taken my Stockrin this is going to come off—I wanted to show them the effects of a negative prevention message. I showed them a video of a young man who was dying of AIDS and throughout his video he was talking about the fact that his message, his dying message, was don't have sex. And we were watching this video together and everyone in this group thought that he was going to pull through. And this video was taken over a couple of months and you watch this person becoming more and more ill and eventually he died. And I was left with twenty-four young people who broke down and it completely destroyed their hope and it struck me then that, included in our prevention messages, we need to be thinking about the people who are really sitting in the audience who are HIV positive—and our messages are not giving them a sense of hope—and it was a very hard lesson for me to learn.

LF: I think this is such an important thing because we haven't really changed our prevention messages. We're not packaging them for specific target groups and the prevention messages that go out to youth do not take into account the fact that many of these kids have been born and grown up and are now adolescents, and they have a right, they have a right to have an emotional life and there are no messages reaching them as to how they can do that in a world where they are living with HIV. And it is people like Sophie that can make the difference. Now that she is working in the worldwide YWCA, she is able to make some more waves.