| Monica White has lived with HIV for the last 11 years and she’s horrified about new statistics showing that HIV diagnoses are increasing the fastest among young women between 15 and 29.
White has been an AIDS activist for years, going into schools and sharing her personal story in the hopes of preventing youth from contracting the virus. She says many teenagers still don’t think they will actually contract HIV despite all the public awareness and attention HIV/AIDS has received.
According to statistics from the United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, women between the ages of 15 to 29 now make up 42 per cent of all new HIV diagnoses in Canada. Young women in that age bracket represented 13 per cent of new HIV infections between 1985 and 1994, but that shot up to 42 per cent in 2004.
"I tell them, ‘don’t sit there and say it’s not going to happen to me because you never know.’ I was 19 once and I was the same way, saying this won’t happen to me, and guess what? I got it," says White.
Alisha Keast is the team leader of client services at AIDS Calgary. She regularly goes into high schools and says there’s a perception among students that, due to effective medication, HIV is no longer such a big deal because people aren’t immediately dying of AIDS.
White says living with HIV is a constant struggle. She has had to watch someone she loved die of AIDS – her husband, whom she contracted the virus from, died in 2000. In the past, she’s had to take as many as 20 pills a day, and often suffered side effects including vomiting, headaches, stomach cramps and severe nightmares. She also struggles to make ends meet while living on Assured Income For the Severely Handicapped (AISH). She says it’s hard to afford the nutritious groceries she needs to keep her health from deteriorating. White says there is also a major stigma attached to people with HIV. "I face discrimination every day," she says.
Keast says gender inequality is likely a reason why HIV diagnoses are increasing among young women – they don’t always feel they can assert control over the sexual relationship.
"That’s really causing an issue within relationships among women and men, so can women say how, when and where they want to have sex, can they negotiate protection when they’re in a relationship?" asks Keast.
"A lot of young women in relationships feel that they need to do whatever to get that intimacy or security or to get that trust, and so they feel like they have to say yes."
Keast says another issue is that sex is still not openly discussed very often in Canadian society.
"We need to be more open about sexual health and that’s still not happening. It’s still a taboo subject," she says. "If we really want to get to the heart of this, then we also need to see young people as sexual beings and not be afraid of them as sexual beings, either, and allow them to have that right, allow them to talk about it, empower them." |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.