The New York Times has an editorial today that in eloquent and searing prose describes how AIDS has become disproportionately a disease of young women. The numbers come from an Annual report from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization. Around the globe in the worst hit regions, young women are now two to six times more likely than young men to be infected.
The root causes: women kept ignorant of sex and sexuality until they marry, no legal rights to personhood or property; a large number reporting rape as their first sexual experience at the hands of family, older men who purchase them or soldiers who abuse them as an act of war. Warning: the WHO report is sickening to read; it is a compendium of every cruelty that can be visited on women because they are women.
The most effective weapon against poverty and exploitation, the one strategy that is proven to increase the health of families and the wealth of nations is the education of girls.
VIA Girl In The Locker Room
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