Disabled people and AIDS outreach efforts

14 January 2011 [MediaGlobal] In the fight against AIDS, people with disabilities are falling through the cracks. The stigma they face makes them both a high-risk and difficult-to-reach group. In the developing world, disabled people are more likely to be illiterate and to face poverty than non-disabled people, they are often denied access to education, and discriminated against. Another, much less discussed form of discrimination disabled people face is exclusion from AIDS education.

Nora Groce, Principal Investigator for the HIV/AIDS and Disability Survey, published by Yale University and the World Bank, said that one of the main reasons for this lack of outreach has been that “it was erroneously assumed that people with disabilities are not sexually active and therefore not at risk for AIDS.” In an interview with MediaGlobal, Groce stressed that not only is this untrue, in fact people who are disabled are also at significantly increased risk for sexual abuse.

When disabled people claim that they have been sexually abused, few people believe them. On top of this vulnerability, in sub-Saharan Africa, a popular folk belief maintains that a HIV positive person can rid himself of the virus by having sex with a virgin, because the disease will be transferred to that virgin. Since it is assumed that disabled people aren´t sexually active, and therefore certainly virgins, they are often targeted for this behavior.

One of the most important factors to overcome when reaching out to people with disabilities is a negative cultural attitude. James Aniyamuzaala, Human Rights programme coordinator for the Youth with Physical Disability Development Forum in Kampala, Uganda told MediaGlobal, “We find that some parents hide children with disabilities at the back of houses because they don´t want the community to see that they have a child with disabilities, they are ashamed, their neighbors might think God has cursed that family.”

It is this lack of access to education that makes disabled children more likely to be illiterate than their peers. “There´s been a massive campaign to include children with disabilities in education and it’s risen from 1 or 2 percent to about 10 percent of all disabled children which means that 90 percent of all disabled children still are not in school,” said Groce.

However, even when disabled children attend school, they are often excluded from sexual education classes because it is believed that they aren’t having sex. “Sexual education in itself is a taboo in Uganda; discussing sex with disabled children is even less popular,” Aniyamuzaala told MediaGlobal.

While the AIDS community has made tremendous outreach efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, much of it remains inaccessible to people with disabilities; radio campaigns don´t reach deaf people, the blind can´t read leaflets on AIDS, and intellectually disabled people might not understand funny slogans.

“Reaching out to disabled people doesn´t need to be expensive, it can be as simple as inviting them to a meeting about AIDS, having a picture of someone in a wheelchair as part of an anti-AIDS campaign, or having a clinic once a week in a VCT (voluntary counseling and testing) center where you have a sign language interpreter available so that deaf people will know to come at that time to get services,” Groce told MediaGlobal.

Providing these healthcare services without discrimination is essential. Groce explained that disabled people who come for testing are often told, ‘You couldn´t possibly have HIV because you´re disabled.’ People who are disabled and have AIDS are put at the bottom of priority lists when it comes to access to health care or social support networks.

The 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities has drawn the attention of governments and civil society by claiming the same human rights for people with disabilities as for everyone else. Now is the time for the AIDS community to reach out and include people with disabilities in all campaigns, as a vulnerable, high-risk group.