HIV Law Project’s Center for Women & HIV Advocacy has released its latest report: “Better Late Than Never: HIV Prevention Among Young Women & Girls."  The report catalogues the myriad biological, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that have caused steadily rising rates of HIV among young women and girls, particularly young women of color.  The report then offers an expansive series of recommendations to promote effective prevention efforts among this population.  Recommendations are based in interventions with proven efficacy, and are premised in the importance of integrating HIV prevention with sexual and reproductive health care.  As the Obama administration moves forward on a National AIDS Strategy, this report offers timely background and important recommendations for halting the rise of HIV among young women and girls.  

The report can be found at:
http://hivlawproject.org/resources/cwha/Better-Late-Than-Never-05072009.pdf

Congratulations to Stephanie Morain, Alison Yager and the others at the Center for this helpful new analysis.

This blog originally appeared on RH Reality Check.

Many of you have been following the case of Ms. T, a 28 year-old HIV-positive pregnant woman from Cameroon who was recently sentenced to 238 days in prison by a judge trying to protect her unborn child from being born with HIV.  Ms. T has spent nearly six months in the Cumberland County Jail in Maine.  It is with much relief that I tell you—Ms. T was released yesterday released on bail, perhaps ironically, for the same reason that the judge originally imprisoned her

In January 2009, Ms. T was arrested for allegedly having false immigration documents.  Only shortly after her arrest, she learned that she was both HIV-positive and pregnant.  Under current federal sentencing guidelines, Ms. T’s charge should have carried a sentence of zero to six months.  So it would have been reasonable for her to expect that she would be given “time served” when she appeared before her sentencing judge on May 14th, and released to continue her care with the team at Maine’s Frannie Peabody Center she had already started working with while she was in custody.
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CHAMP New York was up early today for AIDS Walk 2009! 

Although we were bright, the early morning was not- rain drizzled over Central Park as we searched for our community partner table.  The balloons and the crowd were cheerful too.  And we expanded our team by hundreds, who slapped on CHAMP stickers as they walked by, wearing our slogan:

HIV is not just a disease- it's proof positive of injustice!  

If you are one of the dozens who picked up copies of the HIV Prevention Jusitce Principles, visit us at www.champnetwork.org to endorse the principles or for your organization to join the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance (HIV PJA).  The HIV PJA is hosting its next call on Wednesday, May 27 with guest speakers explaining the relationship between poverty and HIV.

Thanks to CHAMP supporters, our team raised more than $5,000!  With help like this from people in our network, we're able to sustain our independent work to build a community-based movement that links the fight for HIV/AIDS with human rights and social and economic justice.

And thanks to Victor Bernhardtz, we have some great photos!

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As the roll-out of expensive and potentially controversial biomedical HIV prevention tools looms, I wonder whether we too will insist on being heard.  Will we urge authorities to understand that in a crisis, a higher tolerance of risk is sometimes warranted? Will we demand early access, fast access, and expanded access for those who need it most?

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During CHAMP's March community forum to create intergenerational dialogue within the AIDS movement around the ACT UP Oral History Projects, we watched an incredible video compilation of ACT UP protests from the early days of AIDS activism, put together by panelist and ACT UP Oral History Project co-creator Sarah Schulman. An opening scene showed people sitting in the very same room at the LGBT Center that we were sitting in. The room was hadn’t changed in 25 years.  The crowd was even pretty similar-mostly white faces. The only difference was the most recent forum, while a good turnout for a 2009 event, didn't draw as much of a crowd as the standing-room only ACT UP meetings of yore.

This sort-of déjà vu seemed a metaphor for AIDS activism today. Watching the video, I was struck how some of the slogans-"AIDS Budgets Kill!"-and chants-"Act Up, fight back!" can be found in many of the rallies I've attended over the last two years.  As a young person new to the movement, it was incredible seeing the uncanny similarities that I hadn't fully grasped until I saw it firsthand.

ACT UP Philadelphia member Pascal Emmer noticed the similarities too when he first became involved in queer activism. "Most of our works and rhetoric was borrowed from earlier movements, but it lacked a historical context,” Pascal said. Emmer and his friend Jessica Rodriguez joined ACT UP Philadelphia where they started the group's oral history project to highlight the stories of the movement and preserve them for memory so these stories aren't lost.  read more »

From The Defenders Online (the blog of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund).

…28 years into the AIDS epidemic, that silence that once protected us, is now killing us. As we near Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on February 7th, all sorts of pronouncements will be made about the devastation HIV/AIDS is having on the community. And though we are disproportionately impacted by the epidemic, concern for black men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women will not likely come from most quarters of the community. If black leadership is at all concerned with ending this epidemic, we’re going to have to acknowledge and overcome the homophobia that is driving it in the community.