March 10 was National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. The reason we need an entire day recognizing women and girls affected by the disease is because about one in four Americans living with HIV today are women. That’s 25 percent. And women of all ages, races and ethnicities are at risk for an HIV infection. The risks become even higher when women are unaware of HIV or how to prevent it.
Sadly, this may be the reason why women have such a high rate of infection – the dialogue about safe sex practices and HIV prevention is sorely lacking in many areas, especially among young women.
In Alabama, classroom sexual education is not required to be medically accurate (whenever it’s actually given, which often isn’t the case). Perhaps this is one reason why Alabama ranked 22 out of 50 in 2008 for cumulative reported AIDS cases?
That’s not as high as it could be, but it’s also not as low as it could be. And shouldn’t the nationally reported AIDS cases of 1.1 million Americans be significantly lower? Shouldn’t the disease have claimed fewer lives than the 550,000 it already has claimed?
If Americans, and especially women, do not gain access to information about safe sex practices and HIV prevention when they are young, it is unlikely that they will get it when they are older. This vicious cycle continues, only because knowledge of safe sex practices is not given to youth and adults.
This is only one of the reasons why young people should have the right to comprehensive, medically accurate and non-homophobic or sexist information about sex, sexuality and healthy relationships.
Without comprehensive sex education, two young people every hour are infected with HIV in the United States. In addition, traditionally underrepresented populations such as people of color, low-income people, LGBTQ people, immigrants, etc. are at the highest risk for negative consequences from a lack of accurate information about sex and sexuality.
For example, women of color have high rates of some sexually transmitted infections, which can make these women more likely to be infected with HIV. HIV diagnoses in African-American women are nearly 15 times higher than in white women, while HIV diagnoses in Hispanic and Latina women are four times higher than in white women. In Alabama, 62.6 percent of individuals affected by HIV are African-Americans, compared to the 35 percent who are white.
The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, a piece of federal legislation sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee and Senator Frank Lautenberg, will set national standards for sexual health education young people in the U.S. need and deserve.
One of the great things about the act is that it prohibits federal funds from being used for programs that deliberately withhold life-saving information about HIV. Federal funding would be provided to institutions teaching comprehensive sexual health education to adolescents and college students.
Priority in funding would be given to communities with high rates of health disparities in unintended pregnancy, STIs and dating violence and sexual assault, as well as institutions of higher education that serve a large number of students of color and Pell Grant recipients.
In addition to grants for educating young people, funding would be directed to pre-service and in-service teacher training for K-12 sex educators to increase effective teaching of comprehensive sexual health education. All of these measures refer to Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union address to institute and encourage policies and practices that would lead to an “AIDS-free generation.”
Beyond simply recognizing National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, we need to ensure that society is moving forward to create a healthier society.
Johnna Dominguez is a graduate student studying anthropology.
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