Re-focusing the Gender Lens: Caregiving Women, Family Roles and HIV/AIDS Vulnerability in Lesotho

Abstract

Gender and HIV risk have been widely examined in southern Africa, generally with a focus on dynamics within sexual relationships. Yet the social construction of women’s lives reflects their broader engagement with a gendered social system, which influences both individual-level risks and social and economic vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS. Using qualitative data from Lesotho, we examine women’s lived experiences of gender, family and HIV/AIDS through three domains: 1) marriage; 2) kinship and social motherhood, and 3) multigenerational dynamics. These data illustrate how women caregivers negotiate their roles as wives, mothers, and household heads, serving as the linchpins of a gendered family system that both affects, and is affected by, the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS interventions are unlikely to succeed without attention to the larger context of women’s lives, namely their kinship, caregiving, and family responsibilities, as it is the family and kinship system in which gender, economic vulnerability and HIV risk are embedded.

A descriptive analysis of perceptions of HIV risk and worry about acquiring HIV among FEM‐PrEP participants who seroconverted in Bondo, Kenya, and Pretoria, South Africa

“…Moreover, interventions that focus on 1) empowering women and increasing economic independence while transforming gender norms, 2) encouraging safer sexual health practices within marriage and 3) incorporating male involvement into the promotion and use of women-centred approaches [34, 36, 37, 46–48] must continue and intensify.…”

Gendered childcare norms — evidence from rural Swaziland to inform innovative structural HIV prevention approaches for young women

“…One important and pervasive dimension of gender discrimination that has received limited attention in relation to HIV risk, is the expectation that women, including young women, will perform unpaid, childcare-related labour (Harrison, Short, & Tuoane-Nkhasi, 2014). Childcare is highly gendered labour and widely considered "women's work" (Sepulveda-Carmona, 2013).…”

“…However, there is an increasing reliance on women to perform unpaid childcarerelated labour in settings like Swaziland where HIV is highly prevalent (Akintola, 2010;Harrison et al, 2014). In some instances this reliance is perpetuated through international policies, for example, those advocating community-based care of children in family settings rely heavily on women's unpaid care-related labour (UNICEF, 2007).…”

Kenya’s Life Lessons through the Lived Experience of Rural Caregivers

“…In recent years, a shift has occurred from studies examining needs in the urban areas to the needs of rural communities. This shift is in part due to the unique challenges facing rural areas such as migration of males to the urban areas in search of gainful employment, transportation access issues, unequal medical and mental health care, and food insecurity (Ginsberg 2011;Harrison et al 2014;Schatz and Seeley 2015). While the previous list is not exhaustive, it does provide the reader a basic overview of the added pressure in rural areas throughout the world.…”

“…In Kenya, a country in Sub-Saharan Africa, additional struggles are noted to include tribal strife, lack of access to clean water, reduced access to education, and the increasing number of deaths due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Govender et al 2012;Oramasionwu et al 2011; World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa (2017)). Notably, HIV related deaths of parents have deprived many households of able-bodied members while leaving behind young orphans, cared for by older siblings, or cared for by other available family (Harrison et al 2014;Heymann and Kidman 2009;Lee et al 2014;Schatz and Seeley 2015). In recent years, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa (2017) noted drought, food insecurity, cholera, measles, leishmaniosis, and dengue fever as causing increasing numbers of deaths throughout the country of Kenya, thus adding pressure with the continued AIDS/HIV Pandemic.…”