We were incredibly lucky to be able to attend a portion of the AIDS 2022 conference on behalf of Women & Harm Reduction International Network in late July. It’s been a few years of virtual only, and it was so good to meet colleagues, old and new, in person for the first time since 2019. We had many conversations about this, including how funny it is when we have an image of someone from a square and in person, they look completely different from what we imagined. Reality, however, meant that we could greet each other with hugs.
When we arrived, we met each other for the first time and we immediately started making plans. We reviewed our notes for our session: Gold Dust Women: Intersectional Feminists Resisting the War on Drugs, discussed some conference activities, and decided to join Jess Whitbread at the No Pants No Problem party that night. We had a great time, enjoying performances and dancing with HIV activists from all over the world.
When we arrived, we met each other for the first time and we immediately started making plans. We reviewed our notes for our session: Gold Dust Women: Intersectional Feminists Resisting the War on Drugs, discussed some conference activities, and decided to join Jess Whitbread at the No Pants No Problem party that night. We had a great time, enjoying performances and dancing with HIV activists from all over the world.
We met the next morning back at the conference hotel for morning beverages and prep. Just before our session, Eva spoke at another session about pediatric ART access. She was explaining about how access to pediatric HIV medication is very limited in many parts of Asia to some officials – who were not hearing her words. They kept referring to best practices and evidence-based protocols, and that her country was on-board. Later, outside when we debriefed our session, we talked with other attendees about this phenomenon that occurs at conferences like these sometimes. Authorities, researchers, and well-intentioned NGOs, with much of their work being policy-based and quite removed from the frontline, often cannot hear the voices of people with lived experience and people working on the ground. This happens also whenever you hear research and programs refer to “hard to reach” populations. We’re not hard to reach! Women and trans folks who use drugs, who are living with HIV, who are doing sex work, who are taking care of themselves, their children, and their communities are right here. We come to conferences to connect and we say out loud what we need: they just need to listen!
The official conference was from our perspective, not overly friendly to people who use drugs. Admittedly. Even when we looked through the conference program, we could only find 4 or 5 sessions about drug users, most of which had some of our esteemed colleagues from INPUD as speakers. There were lots of sessions about big pharma though, which huge ads from Gilead everywhere. Even the session about prison needle exchange in Canada only had staff and authorities from the Correctional Service of Canada on the panel, and the moderator kept talking about how great it was that the session had “both voices” from the program!!???
All that aside, Gold Dust Women: Intersectional Feminists Resisting the War on Drugs was a great success. With Jess Whitbread from AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) as the moderator, we engaged in conversation about how prohibition is a feminist issue, and intersects with the HIV movement. Rhiannon spoke about WHRIN’s recently launched advocacy brief on the intersecting injustices and opportunities for women who use drugs. Eva shared insights and experiences about the activism happening in Indonesia, particularly around the campaign for the Elimination of Violence Against Women who Use Drugs. The theme in 2021 was “stop judging without knowing” and focused on ending stigma and discrimination for women and trans people who use drugs. The campaign worked to engage in understanding of people’s lives, as it is real-life stories that usually elicit response in the public, and this campaign, through extensive social media sharing, reached the mainstream media. Eva’s emphasis on leaving no woman behind was powerful and resonates deeply, because that is the root of true intersectional feminism – in the words of American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer: “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Our co panelist, Olenna Stryzhak from Positive Women Ukraine and ICW, from Ukraine talked about how women, trans folks and sex workers who use drugs in the Eastern Europe/Central Asia region work closely together to fight for their collective rights. She talked about how these communities are often put into silos ad silenced through division, but by engaging in mutual aid and collective action, they are fighting back. Olenna also talked about how women who use drugs found to get methadone to each other. Since the war started, many of these hard-won programs have been suspended, and once again, women are finding other underground ways of taking care of each other and get the medications they need.
The day after the Gold Dust Women session, Eva had the opportunity to once again be involved in a similar discussion with Jess Whitbread and several other colleagues from Ukraine, Canada and Trinidad Tobago about the issue of the feminist movement in the context of women who use drugs who are also living with HIV. Colleagues from various countries described actual conditions in the context of their respective countries and Eva affirmed on similar issues experienced in Indonesia which seem to be largely overlooked, even in international AIDS conferences. We hope that in the future issues related to women who use drugs who are also living with HIV will get more space and time to be discussed in forums like this.
We are always frustrated and amazed when we get the chance to connect with women who use drugs from around the world. Frustrated because despite regional differences, the issues we face are all the same: stigma, discrimination, violence, and a lack of visibility and support from systems that purport to take care of people – and the worst: that child apprehension happens all over the world. Jessica said it well at the panel: the utter cruelty of taking away the most precious thing to a parent. However, the flip side is that women who use drugs from around the world are absolutely and utterly committed to fighting for human rights, and leaving no women behind.
