Vulnerability to HIV reflects an

Vulnerability to HIV reflects an
individual’s or community’s inability
to control their risk of HIV infection.
Poverty, gender inequality and
harassment from state officials,
including the police, are all factors that
can increase people’s vulnerability to
HIV infection. Many populations are
vulnerable to HIV. Women and girls,
young people, people living in poverty,
migrant labourers, people in conflict and
post-conflict situations, refugees and
internally displaced people all
experience situations where they haveless control over their HIV risk than
they should and programmes should
prioritize their HIV prevention needs.
Both risk and vulnerability need to be
addressed in planning comprehensive
responses to the epidemic. However,
for the most part HIV prevention efforts
continue to prioritize risk reduction over
vulnerability reduction. Examples include:
􀂄 programmes that provide information
to drug users about safe injecting
practices, but then governments jail
drug users for possessing clean
injecting equipment, which increases
their vulnerability to HIV;
􀂄 organizations, which provide sexual
health services to sex workers but
provide no protection from violence
or coercion to engage in unsafe sex, fail
in their duty to provide a comprehensive
range of interventions; and
􀂄 projects that seek to educate men
who have sex with men about HIV
transmission are undermined by the
criminalization of homosexuality, and
the consequent imprisonment and
violence that gay and other men who
have sex with men often experience
at the hands of police.
A human rights approach to HIV
All of these ‘programming failures’ are
in fact violations of fundamental human
rights. HIV prevention programmes
continue to be stalled and undermined
by these abuses, and assessments of
the effectiveness of particular interventions
continually fail to address the problem
of the abjectly hostile policy environment
for responding to AIDS in many countries.
As a result, human rights abuses of key
populations fuel infection and violations
of their rights follow infection,
exacerbating the impact of the epidemic.
Protecting the rights and interests of
individuals at greater risk of HIV
infection is therefore an important public
health intervention which can both help
stem the tide of new infections and
mitigate the impact of the disease.