Groups link fight against AIDS to rape prevention

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The world's top AIDS donors, including the U.S. president's fund, need to link the fight against the deadly virus to preventing the rape and abuse of women and girls, rights groups said on Tuesday.

The Women Won't Wait coalition said violence against women and girls was a cause -- through rape -- and a consequence of a rapid spread of HIV among females, who now make up nearly half the 40 million people infected around the world and account for more than 60 percent infected in sub-Saharan Africa.

The group said that many women become infected with AIDS when they are raped, many by their husbands, but when it becomes known that they have the virus then they are blamed and face more violence.

"It is vital that the policies, programs and funding streams of national governments and international agencies transparently address the intersection of HIV and AIDS and violence against women," said Mary Robinson, president of Realizing Rights and former president of Ireland.

A Women Won't Wait report found the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, President George W. Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the World Bank, Britain's Department for International Development, and UNAIDS, the United Nations' AIDS organization, provide "scant resources" for efforts to combat violence against women that are largely separate from AIDS programs.

"Their ultimate failure to address the linkages of violence against women and girls and HIV/AIDS means that they also fail to articulate and execute an agenda that gives priority to securing the human rights of women," wrote the report's author, Susana Fried.

The report was also critical of Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief for its emphasis on abstinence, faithfulness and appropriate use of condoms, saying it fails to recognize that in certain countries faithfully married women are the most at risk.

"Women and girls of Africa are pawns within the ideological battle underway in the United States," said Lori Michau of Uganda-based women's rights group Raising Voices.

"We must demand that universal principles of human rights, scientific evidence, and common humanity guide the formation and implementation of U.S. government policy -- not political and religious ideology."