Cynthia Rothschild

Center for Women's Global Leadership

Cynthia Rothschild, Senior Policy Advisor to the Center for Women's Global Leadership, has been involved in HIV,human rights and sexuality advocacy for 18 years. She is currently consulting in areas related to the United Nations, HIV/AIDS and sexual rights. She is the author of Written Out: How Sexuality is Used to Attack Women's Organizing, the co-author of Amnesty International's Crimes of Hate, Conspiracy of Silence: Torture and Ill-Treatment Based on Sexual Identity, and the author of a number of recently published articles on sexual rights.  Cynthia is a former member of Amnesty International USA's Board of Directors, and has worked with UNIFEM and a number of NGOs in UN advocacy on women's human rights, reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS.

Jagged Landscape of Failures and Successes: HIV and Gender-Based Violence

Cynthia Rothschild

Cynthia Rothschild is Senior Policy Advisor to the Center for Women's Global Leadership.

Usually when we think of the HIV pandemic, we think of one big health crisis, and a lot of "mini-pandemics" under its umbrella, many of which are based in social "ills" of some sort. Crises in immigration. Under-resourced or even failing health care systems. Millions of kids who have or will lose their parents to AIDS. But we too infrequently think of HIV as part of *another* pandemic - that of the universal and seemingly un-abating crisis of gender-based violence (GBV) And, more to the point here, we (I understand this "we" to be quite broad: activists, policymakers, researchers, academics, health care providers, teachers, etc.) - "we" writ large - have not paid close enough attention to the ways these social and health crises are linked. HIV and gender-based violence, and violence against women in particular, are mutually reinforcing. In too many circumstances, they invent each other, as cause and consequence.