Property Rights for AIDS widows Now

I've been reading about AIDS for almost 20 years and felt helpless about the growing catastrophe in Africa, but I never once heard about "property-stripping."

Property stripping is the traditional practice of the husband's family inheriting all his property after he dies.

In normal times, this had some logic; the husband's family had responsibility for the widow and her children, a brother often taking her as a second wife and so assuming responsibility for his nieces and nephews.

But things have changed. In the time of AIDS, the widow is likely also infected with the HIV virus, though not yet sick since her husband often gets it first and the disease is less advanced in her when her husband dies. So even if her brother-in-law hasn't died from AIDS himself, he is not willing to marry someone infected with HIV. And often the brother-in-law himself is sick or dead. Nevertheless, the family often still follows custom and seizes her house and farm and so she has no recourse but to turn to menial jobs, begging or prostitution. And since she was infected later, she may have years to spread her illness to her sex partners which are commonly many a day.

In a Washington Post editorial by Richard Holbrooke, published after Dr. Kim's NPR interview, he noted that increased testing and detection efforts was the "only effective prevention strategies can stop the spread of AIDS." He goes on to point out that "...monogamous women [are] thrown out of their homes for a disease they got from their husbands."

In other words, the survival strategies of poor, destitute women have become a major vector of the HIV virus.

Schaefer in How Stripping Spreads Aids says the cure for property stripping is "cheap, technically quite easy and would have an enormous secondary impact on economic growth"

The AIDS community talks endlessly about women's rights so why are they so silent one a problem which the community itself identifies as vitally important? The real irony is that solving this problem is politically correct in every aspect. A solution for property stripping will help widows and orphans and expand women's rights for every woman, whether affected by AIDS or healthy widows. Money is power and having control of their homes is a source of personal, social, political leverage that African women sorely lack today.