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Rights. Respect. Responsibility.®—The Fix the GAP Campaign Toolkit [PDF]
Rights. Respect. Responsibility.®—The Fix the GAP Campaign
What Is the Fix the GAP Campaign?
Fix the GAP Campaign is a direct organizing effort, led by Advocates for Youth’s Youth Activist Network (YAN). The long-term goal of the Campaign is to remove the restriction that one-third of prevention funds allocated under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) be spent on ineffective and medically unethical abstinence- until-marriage programs. The Campaign’s intermediate goal is to reach out to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House International Relations Committee, urging them to stop the exportation of U.S. anti-condom programs and to support U.S. global funding for comprehensive HIV prevention education. A second intermediate goal of Fix the GAP is to publish 25 op-eds and 25 letters to the editor in local newspapers in response to media articles about PEPFAR. The op-eds and letters to the editor will educate the American public about PEPFAR and about youth’s need for comprehensive HIV prevention.
Why Is Advocates’ Youth Activist Network Launching the Fix the GAP Campaign?
Advocates for Youth believes that all young people have the right to balanced, accurate, and realistic education about HIV prevention. Young people deserve respect and to participate in developing HIV prevention programs and policies. Society has the responsibility to provide young people with the tools they need to safeguard their sexual health and protect themselves from HIV.
Unfortunately, PEPFAR is not in line with these values due to its abstinence-until-marriage approach to HIV prevention. PEPFAR’s prevention policies fail to protect young people. This is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that 50 percent of all new HIV infections occur in young people ages of 15 through 24.
Advocates for Youth is launching a two-year campaign called Fix the GAP to advocate for young people’s right to comprehensive HIV prevention education in HIV programs around the world. The Campaign will do this by targeting the United States Congress—urging removal of funding set aside in PEPFAR for abstinence-until-marriage programs and approaches.
What Is PEPFAR?
In 2003, the United States Congress authorized a five-year piece of legislation known as the U.S. Leadership against Global HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act. This Act mandated PEPFAR and set up the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) at the State Department to coordinate the U.S. government’s response to global HIV and AIDS. While it has been a milestone of increased American action regarding HIV and AIDS, aspects of the Act also raised ideology above science-based public health practice, resulting in funding for ineffective programs and a waste of taxpayers’ dollars.
The most outrageous example of the Act’s raising ideology above science is the mandate that 33 percent of all prevention funding be directed to abstinence- until-marriage programs. This is one-third of all funds—not just to prevent sexual transmission of HIV—but also to prevent perinatal* (mother-to-child) and other types of transmission. In fact, OGAC requires that 66 percent of all funds to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV in every PEPFAR country go to abstinence- until-marriage programs.
The U.S. government maintains that its prevention policy is the ABC approach—that is, “Abstinence, Be faithful, and use Condoms.” The ABC approach is widely credited with the significant reduction of HIV infections in Uganda and is effective due to its comprehensive nature—using each strategy together with the others. In reality, PEPFAR requires prevention programs for young people to focus solely on sexual abstinence (no sex until marriage) a strictly A approach, and applies B to married youth. For sexually active, unmarried youth, PEPFAR ignores the critical strategies of reducing the number of one’s sexual partners (Be faithful) and of using Condoms. PEPFAR asserts that condoms are only for “high-risk populations”—a category into which PEPFAR clusters commercial sex workers and injected drug users. PEPFAR does not include young people in the high-risk category, even though half of all new HIV infections occur in youth under the age of 25. Denying young people a vital tool to protect themselves from contracting HIV denies them a fundamental human right to information.
PEPFAR’s version of ABC also ignores the fact that married adolescent women are far more likely to become infected with HIV than are their unmarried peers. In some cultures, girls as young as 13 are married off to men more than twice their age. While most of these very young married women remain faithful, the reality is that their husbands often do not. By maintaining that ABC is the official prevention policy, the U.S. government ignores the millions of young girls and women who do not have the power to choose whom they marry or when they marry or, once married, to refuse unprotected sex.
PEPFAR places a priority on funneling money to faith-based organizations—even those that, using a religious rationale, exclude information about prevention methods such as condoms. Even though many faith-based organizations have an important role in the fight against HIV and AIDS, government funding should not be awarded to those with little or no public health background and no proven experience in working to prevent HIV in Africa. In reality, it is just such organizations—without public health background or experience—that have been awarded large grants under PEPFAR.
In early 2006, members of Congress plan to introduce bills to provide comprehensive HIV prevention for women and girls and to highlight the inadequacies and limitations in PEPFAR’s current prevention strategy. This will provide an opportunity for advocates to demonstrate their support for a more rational and pragmatic approach to HIV prevention. Moreover, in order to continue funneling money through PEPFAR, Congress will have to reauthorize it in 2007. This will provide a golden opportunity for advocates to raise their voices, urging their Congressional legislators to remove the abstinence- until-marriage funding set-aside in order to ensure that young people get honest, accurate, and comprehensive HIV prevention education.
* Refers to the time, usually several weeks, before and after the birth of an infant.
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