By giving scholarships to girls who are virgins, South
Africa is trying to control women's bodies while ignoring the role of men and
sexual violence in spreading HIV/AIDS, a campaigner said.
In KwaZulu-Natal, uThekela municipality is offering
higher education scholarships, known as The Maidens Bursary, to girls who can
prove they are virgins.
“This is part of our contribution in fighting HIV and
AIDS and also in encouraging education,” Dudu Mazibuko, mayor of uThekela municipality,
told local media.
“When they get into high school that is when they start
to be sexually active and they end up with HIV and AIDS and unwanted
pregnancies.”
South Africa has the largest population living with
HIV/AIDS, some 6.8 million people, or 19 percent of adults, according to the
United Nations (UN) Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Its government, like many across Africa, has been
promoting sexual abstinence as a way of tackling the pandemic.KwaZulu-Natal, home of South Africa's polygamous president
Jacob Zuma, has one of the country's highest rates of HIV.
The Zulu king reintroduced the traditional reed dance
ceremonies, for which girls must pass a virginity test to participate, several
years ago in a bid to promote chastity and combat the disease.
“Virginity testing is just one symptom of the policing of
how women dress, how they behave,” Tanya Charles, of the South African advocacy
group Sonke Gender Justice, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In 2014, a public outcry pushed KwaZulu-Natal's health
department to abandon plans to implant contraceptives in 12 female students who
had received scholarships to study in India.
“It is a worrying trend,” Charles said. “It points to an
ignorance if you think HIV is only spread because girls are having too much sex
or unprotected sex or if the solution is thought to be controlling women's
sexuality.”
More attention needs to be paid to the gender
inequalities that make HIV prevalence so much higher among girls than boys, she
said, such as poverty. Many girls trade sex for money, particularly with older
men.
South Africa has one of the highest incidence of rape in
the world, with more than one-third of girls experiencing sexual violence
before the age of 18, according to the Medical Research Council.
South Africa's Department of Women said that it was going
to “engage with” the municipality to ensure girls and boys have equal access to
education.
“Obviously boys are not subjected to inhuman treatments
like virginity testing in order for them to be given a particular bursary,” its
spokeswoman, Charlotte Lobe, said.
“The best way for protecting girls against unwanted
pregnancy, against HIV and AIDS is to give them education.”'
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