Challenging sexual norms with the sexual rights campaign.

The human race is faced with a new struggle or freedom: freedom from HIV and Aids. Every one of us is beginning to have intimate experiences of the disease - through living with it ourselves, through a family member who is dying of Aids, through the orphans in our neighborhoods. We are traumatised and distressed because of multiple bereavements in our own families, and the stigma is breaking down our community values such that many people are being left to die alone.

For many years we have done educational programmes promoting the strategies of ABC (Abstain - Be faithful - Condomise), and still the infection rate has soared. In the meantime our hopes for vaccines and microbicides have not yet materialised, and anti-retrovirals currently remain beyond our reach. Education therefore still remains our only tool in our struggle against the pandemic.

However, we are now challenged to unpack and analyse what the educational programmes promoting ABC haven't offered us so far. We have spoken continuously about abstinence, about 'being faithful' or using condoms without analysing what happens when people close their bedroom doors. This didn't raise the issue of who our custodians in our bedrooms are, who decides what should happen and whether to use a condom or not.

Cultural barriers to the ABC strategy

We therefore need to launch a campaign that speaks to the social and cultural barriers to the ABC strategy we have promoted for so long with little success. We need to develop a strategy that will enable us to examine our traditional values of sexual relations and challenge how we live our sexuality within our own communities.

Let's start by analysing the call for abstinence: how does this fit into our values of sex? We know from research that in the Southern African region, most of us as women experienced our first sexual relationship as forced or coerced, either directly or indirectly.

Very few of us decided that 'today is the day I feel I am ready to engage in sexual relations.' We are living in a society where there is a lot of peer pressure to engage in sexual relations among the youth, where raping girls is seen as cool, where boys believe that 'making a baby is proving your fertility and you can try to prove your fertility with many girls and there is nothing wrong about it'. Promoting abstinence without challenging these sexual norms and values is obviously not a useful strategy.

We talk about 'being faithful' in a society that has normalised multiple sexual partners for men, whether married or single. We condone this as long as he provides financially, and we ask our sisters and daughters "is he not still buying mealie meal? Is he not coming back home at night?" But we don't go further and say "you are standing a risk of contracting HIV and Aids."

There is a growing trend of older married men having sexual relations with young women. This is taking place in the context of a society that is very poor but has access to the global images of youth having beautiful jeans, a cell phone and cash to boast around with friends. These older men might have had more than sixty sexual partners in their lives, but because they are providing financially they are dictating the terms in their relationship with a girl who is in a weak position to negotiate for safer sex.

This also puts our young men at risk, as the young women may also have relationships with boyfriends of their age.

Custodians of the condom

Let us come to the issue of using condoms. How can we use condoms when we feel that we still need to give birth, either to avoid being cursed by our parents who value large families, or because our family name needs to be passed on, or because we need to maintain a population dying out from Aids.

We need to seriously question all those messages. Getting pregnant means unprotected sex; sex without a condom, which not only allows the sperm cell to travel from one body to another but also the HIV virus. Women and men are still deciding to have a baby without considering an HIV test as part of the decision making, and we will continue to see babies dying at 4 or 6 weeks until we have overcome the stigma of testing for HIV and Aids.

While men are still considered the custodians of sexual norms who sanction everything that happens in the bedroom, women's negotiations for using condoms are often met with hostility, threats of desertion, even physical violence. And the very same women who are threatened with desertion are living in a society that says 'you are not woman enough if you are not married, you are not woman enough if you do not have a child, you are not woman enough if you do not have a man above you to control you.' We are living in a society where a woman will never have a status unless there is a man signed in to give her that status.

These are some of the many challenges that we as communities, as a society are faced with. We need to find ways to engage one another in dialogue, not only to analyse cultural values of masculinity and femininity, but to redefine sexuality such that sex is not only considered as a pleasurable thing for men, but as a positive and pleasurable experience for both men and women.

Building a new culture

We need to build a new generation of men who no longer commercialise sex, not only by using the services of sex workers, but by making sex a man's right in marriage and a price for a woman to pay for all that he is providing for the family. We need to build a new group of men who will use condoms not only with casual sexual partners but with their wives or girlfriends. We need to build a new group of men who will stop harassing women at the work place. Gender inequality is rife in our institutions, with most of the senior positions still occupied by men, making women vulnerable to sexual exploitation such as giving sex for a promotion.

We need to build a new group of women who know and claim their sexual rights; women who believe in themselves that they have the right to choose with whom, when and how to have sex, according to what would make them enjoy it most. We need to build a new group of women who will break the silence around sexual violence; who are going to report rape and incest; women who feel confident to negotiate for safer sex and refuse to submit to hostility, threats, coercion and violence. We also need to build a society where each and every individual will be able to express and exercise his or her sexual orientation without being victims of diverse ideological complexities.

We need to build a new culture that will promote equality, mutual respect, mutual decision-making and mutual responsibility in sexual relations. We need to declare access to sexual health information as a right, and break barriers such as virginity testing that aim at controlling girls' bodies while denying them access to sexual health information. We need to declare access to sexual health services as a right and challenge authoritarian relationships between the health provider and the clients. Women and men who experience sexually transmitted diseases are often called names within our health system, and are blamed as irresponsible and ignorant.

We also need to revisit the policies that exist in our countries that disempower us; policies that have defined reproductive rights over sexual rights, therefore denying the rights of people who don't do sex for procreation. We need to scrap policies that stigmatise and criminalise sex work, preventing sex workers from accessing health services. We further need to challenge policies that deny women the right to decide when to have a child; the right to exercise control over their body; policies that deny woman access to safe abortion services.

We in South Africa launched the Sexual Rights Campaign in 1999. It is a joint effort by NGOs and government departments. Together we are creating space for dialogue and action around all the issues raised above and many more. We are mobilising policy makers, educators, health workers, police officers, traditional leaders, religious leaders, women's groups, men's groups, people from different sexual orientations to identify and challenge the cultural barriers hindering our struggle against HIV and Aids.

We are hoping to launch a Sexual Rights Charter in September this year, where people from different ministries and constituencies will come together to define sexual rights and develop strategies for addressing barriers to mutual respect in sexual decision making in all sectors of our society.

(This is an extract from a public talk given in Windhoek in June on the Sexual Rights Campaign in South Africa by Ndivhuwo Masindi, Senior Trainer with the Women's Health Project, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.)