FEARS IN THE DARK

[Guest guest]

FEARS IN THE DARK

The Telegraph 21 November, 2001 New Delhi.

The incredible history of a young female pavementdweller in Clacutta brings out

how difficult and complicated sexual health work still is in West Bengal. Female

powerlessness, sexual violence, brutal ignorance regarding HIV/AIDS, and the

backwardness of government hospitals are some of the factors that

non-governmental organizations working on sexual health have to confront in the

state. Gang-raped in Bihar when eighteen, this girl was brought back, pregnant,

to Calcutta by her family, where she tested HIV positive in a government

hospital. Her child died, and her family married her off, but without informing

her husband's family of her medical or sexual history. She conceived again, but

by that time her husband and in-laws had come to know of her HIV positive

status, and of her having been raped. She was thrown out of their home, only to

be diagnosed HIV negative when taken for tests to the school of Tropical

Medicine by an NGO. The earlier result was obviously wrong, but the damage had

been done. She was disowned by her own and her husband's families, and now fends

for herself and for her child by working as a domestic help. She still finds it

difficult to convince people-including most of the nurses and doctors in the

government hospitals who have refused to treat her-that she is not a health

hazard.

The stigma of rape on a woman is not a new thing in a society luridly fixated on

female chastity. This woman bears the additional burden of a benighted fear of

HIV/AIDS, not only among ordinary people, but also within the medical,

paramedical and nursing professions. This breeds fear as well as secretiveness.

Larger ethical questions of privacy, confidentiality and the obligatory

disclosure of medical history, by individuals and by hospitals, are also

relevant here. But the combination of medical progress, human rights vigilance,

legal reform and social awareness-raising becomes particularly difficult to

achieve when sexual and medical taboos remain frozen within a medieval

witch-hunt mentality. And this is just as true within the family and the larger

community, as within such public institutions as the state healthcare system.

This is where the governmental sexual health projects remain clueless, apathetic

and ineffectual, leaving it almost entirely to beleaguered NGOs to do the bulk

of the real work.

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Jagdish Harsh ( jharsh@... )

François-Xavier Bagnoud (INDIA) ( www.fxb.org )

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