By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 13 2004 (IPS)

Rosa Polanco was in the hospital in the Dominican Republic, being treated for a liver disease, when she was illegally tested without her consent for HIV, the AIDS virus.

But perhaps the worst thing about it was not finding out that she was living with HIV, but how she was informed, and the consequences of the disclosure of her status to her family.

”There was one doctor, very rude. He said 'What you have is AIDS, because you weren’t careful’, in front of my” two young daughters.

Polanco, 34, lost her job and was thrown out of her home by her mother, who would not let her touch her own daughters.

She now lives alone in a wooden shack without sanitation, water or electricity in a slum neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city of Santiago in the northern part of this Caribbean nation, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

”Many people live in this kind of housing in the Dominican Republic, but Rosa lives there only because she is a woman testing positive for HIV,” said Marianne Mollmann, the Americas Researcher in the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

”Those who test positive are generally fired or denied employment. This has a particularly negative impact on women, who are more likely than men to know they are HIV-positive, and who already are severely underrepresented in the formal workforce.”

Mollmann is the author of the 50-page report ‘A Test of Inequality: Discrimination Against Women Living With HIV in the Dominican Republic,’, which was presented Tuesday by the New York-based human rights group.

Women as well as men living with HIV suffer stigmatisation and discrimination in Dominican society due to ignorance regarding the transmission of the AIDS virus and the myths surrounding the disease, said Mollmann.

”But women suffer doubly, because they are often blamed for infecting their partners, who abandon them. They are also frequently the victims of (domestic) violence,” as well as mistreatment in the health system and the workplace, Mollmann told IPS in an e-mail interview.

Polanco is just one of the more than 60 women who described similar experiences to HRW researchers when the study was carried out early this year in several Dominican cities.

An estimated 61,000 women in the Dominican Republic, a country of 8.5 million, are living with HIV or suffering full-blown AIDS, according to the joint United Nations HIV/AIDS programme (UNAIDS).

The study, conducted by Mollmann and Janet Walsh, deputy director of the Women’s Rights Division, documents a large number of human rights violations against women living with HIV/AIDS – within the family, the public health system, and the workplace.

”These abuses are the government’s responsibility,” Mollmann said at the presentation of the report.

She stated that although the Dominican government has implemented important HIV/AIDS programmes, it has failed to take seriously the link between the vulnerability of women and the spread of the epidemic.

It has also failed to enforce existing mechanisms aimed at combating violations of the human rights of women living with HIV/AIDS, including a ban on carrying out involuntary AIDS tests among workers and on divulging the results, Mollmann added.

HRW recommends that president-elect Leonel Fernández Reyna, who will take office Aug. 16, make the protection of the rights of women a central feature of the new government’s national plans for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.

With political will, things could begin to change, if the new government finds the way to make good use of the 40 million dollars assigned to the Dominican Republic this year by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, says the report.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic have the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean: two percent of the population. As of late 2001, women accounted for 51 percent of all cases.

AIDS is the main cause of death among Dominican women between the ages of 15 and 49. UNAIDS estimates that more than 70 percent of new HIV infections are the result of sexual relations in heterosexual couples.

”The social bias” that requires that women be ”faithful and (which holds them) ultimately responsible for their husband or long-term partner’s infidelity compounds the fear felt by many women of being known to be HIV-positive,” says the HRW report.

”This fear is further propelled by the prevalence of domestic violence,” the fourth cause of death among women in the Dominican Republic in 2000, according to government sources.

A 2002 survey by Measure DHS+, which assists developing countries in the collection and use of data to monitor and evaluate population, health, and nutrition programmes, found that 27 percent of adult women in the Dominican Republic had suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse at the hands of their husbands or stable partners.

DHS+ also found that a 19-year-old woman in the Dominican Republic was three times more likely to say she had been subjected to an AIDS test than a man of the same age.

Among adults under 40, two-thirds of Dominican women said they had been subjected to an AIDS test, compared to less than 40 percent of men.

Companies in export-processing zones, the tourism industry and the service sector in the Dominican Republic, which hire large numbers of women, often require that employees and job applicants undergo AIDS testing.

Many women stop seeking work out of fear of ostracism or of being abandoned by their husbands if the test results were to come back positive and were disclosed to their families without their permission.

Women in the Dominican Republic are also frequently subjected to AIDS tests without their consent when seeking prenatal care in the public heath system.

The report states that the HRW researchers ”also spoke to a number of HIV-positive women who said they had been sterilised because of their HIV status without receiving full information about their rights and choices, and thus without their informed consent.”

In addition, women testing positive for HIV are often denied adequate health care.

Isabel Guzmán, a 21-year-old mother of two, told the HRW researchers that after giving birth, ”I had to clean myself alone. They did not clean the baby. My mother cleaned him…One nurse did not want to inject me. She told my mother she did not want to” because I was HIV-positive.

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