Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence (Series in Health and Social Justice)

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Books on Women's Health Issues
Review: "Lucid, smart, passionate, and compassionate, Women, Poverty & AIDS puts the calss back into class analysis. Through a diversity of voices, experiences, geographies and disciplines, the contributors argue that poverty as a factor in the global HIV epidemic is pervasive, neglected, and urgent. Povery is inescapably linked to gender. Acall to arms on behalf of health and social justice for poor women, its impact is searing." --Paula Treichler, University of Illinois, Urbana, editor of The Feminist Dictionary

"Exceedingly well-written, this book shows that AIDS is a wake-up call--we must be about the business of transforming our world, if for no other reason than to prevent the creation of a worse epidemic, which could be the inevitable sequel to our failure to contain this one. A compelling presentation of people, programs and ideas, Women, Poverty & AIDS has an important message of hope." --Robert Fullilove and Mindy Fullilove, M.D., Columbia School of Public Health

"Moving beyond a simple biomedical model, this book compels us to view AIDS in women in a wholly new way, as an inescapable event in lives devalued by the forces of poverty, racism, and sexism. This extraordinary multidisciplinary effort should serve as the guidebook for those who want to understand how AIDS could become a leading killer of young women in a mere decade." --Deborah Cotton, M.D., Massachusetts General Hospital, editor of The Medical Management of AIDS in Women

"Women, Poverty & AIDS makes a major contribution by staying always close to the lived realities of real people in real places, and refusing the old, empty, pat answers to difficult questions. A hard-nosed, real-life analysis--an antidote to status quo thinking--this should be required reading for all who care about AIDS--or public health." --Jonathan Mann, M.D., Director of the International AIDS Center, and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health

Rating:
Summary: A terrible contradiction
Review: WPA is a book that makes a horrible contradiction, it asks professionals working in related fields to the AIDS pandemic to examine certain kinds of structural violence regarding gender and poverty, which the authors correctly claim have been mostly overlooked - that is, poor women forms one of the groups most brutally hit by AIDS. No help, no medicine, no programs, no interest from academics, public health institutions, etc results in brutal and lethal suffering for poor women and their families. On the other hand, by the language they use to talk about prostitution systems, WPA authors practice and perpetuate serious forms of structural violence against poor women and children.

The book is divided into 3 parts: 1) "Rethinking AIDS" tries to take a global look at the AIDS pandemic specially regarding poor women; 2) "Rereading AIDS," examines problems with social science, public health, and clinical medicine on AIDS and poor women; and 3) profiles organizations who offer services to people with AIDS with a sensitive framework towards poverty and women.

Throughout the book, where the issue of prostitution regularly appears, the authors adopt the trend to refer to women and children in prostitution as "sex workers." They do alternatively use "prostitute," but the emphasis is "sex worker," "sex tourism," "sex industry," words which serve to hide any form of violence, crime, and torture in prostitution systems. Even in their own vignette of Lata, a prostituted teenager, which is such a typical case in prostitution or the rape tourism industry, which exemplifies so many of the forms of violence suffered by prostituted children and women, the authors use mostly a falsely non-violent language that serves to make invisible and push away from conscience the very violence the authors are describing. Lata is an Indian girl who is "sold" by her parents to a pimp, she is raped, kidnapped, and sexually and psychologically abused into a prostitution system, and after all of that, while still in captivity, while still being coerced to have sex with men (i.e. being systematically raped), she is called by the authors a "sex worker." It is particularly disgusting to see authors who write a book asking people to take into account structural forms of violence against women - in particular, the brutal consequences of poverty: lack of safety, human rights, medical care, care for their children, economic survival, psychological well being- and who at the same time use a vocabulary and language that serves to hide so many forms of violence perpetrated against these very women and children in prostitution systems. I don't see using "sex worker" as a step forward from "prostitute." If the word "prostitute" carries a stigma, the problem won't be resolved by using a language that serves to hide the violence involved in the system. Authors can come up with something less irresponsible than that.

The term "sex worker" is so comfortable, so nifty, so postmodern-chic, so trendy-but so disgustingly violent, so corrupt in its insensitivity to the suffering and trauma perpetrated against defenseless children and women in prostitution, and so in collusion with every single person who would like to erase from the public eye, and consequently from accountability and punishment, the great violations of various human rights involved in systems of prostitution and the rape tourism industry. This is particularly problematic in a book that has subtitles such as " the use of culture and construction of denial to explain this or that," "making it explicit: women, poverty, AIDS," "exaggeration of poor women's agency," and not least, "lack of accountability." It's Orwellian.

Authors such as those from WPA usually justify their practice of the above violence by saying that "sex worker, et al" is a vocabulary that does not stigmatize those in prostitution. But the compounded horrendous forms of violence (specially structural ones) in prostitution are much worse than the processes of stigmatization. So why, when there is so much violence in prostitution, have academics adopted such a camouflaged, deceptive wording? How privileged, dehumanized, and lacking in accountability regarding a language that erases real violence from conscience in prostitution systems are these and other authors?

The answer, unfortunately, is "very." Albeit WPA provides some very important information, plus heartbreaking profiles of diverse women, nationally and internationally brutalized by AIDS, plus the discussion of various serious problems regarding poor women and AIDS, it felt, in my view, like two steps backwards, one step forward. Purporting to raise issues of the violence of poverty towards women and their families - of which prostitution is a significant destroyer of human rights-the authors end up caught up in the same problem they are trying to denounce.