Domestic Violence and HIV/AIDS

Domestic Violence and HIV/AIDS

Domestic Violence and HIV/AIDS

This is one major problem for along with bride kidnapping (abduction, still widely practiced in Georgia, especially in the rural regions but generally acceptable for society in the capital too), divorce, domestic violence, and trafficking in persons.

According to the one (and the only) NGO "Women in the Future" running a hotline to collect data about the victims of trafficking, total number of the victims reach 300, 2/3 of whom are women (USAID, 2003). However, I have enough evidence to consider this data depicts only very few cases. Trafficking makes women especially vulnerable not only towards different violations of their human rights, but also towards HIV/AIDS, as it opens door to uncontrollable exposure of their bodies to male partners from foreign countries, which may infect women, who otherwise would have no touch with the epidemic.

Another significant obstacle for women's full enjoyment of their human rights is domestic violence in Georgia. This is actually considered to be the most serious problem for women in Georgia, as it is entangled with the archaic social understanding and values and thus becomes very difficult even to assess, saying nothing about the remedies. Having no legislative document (the same as for trafficking) prohibiting domestic violence, it is extremely troublesome to name and fight against domestic violence. The attempt to this latter is undermined by widespread social understanding of family life being private and thus tabooed for further discussion.

Even when named, victims of domestic violence would rather conceal the truth than make it public, because they fear that the court can provide no valuable mechanism to protect them from a recurrence of the case. Besides the law, there are no specific shelters for the victims and their future after making the "private" issue public is vague and obscure. Thus, ...