President Yoweri Museveni
State House Nakasero
P.O. Box 24594, Kampala
Tel: 256-41-343311
Fax: 256-41-255243
Email: info@statehouse.go.ug

[Date]

Dear President Museveni:

I am gravely concerned about domestic violence and its impact on women’s vulnerability to HIV infection in Uganda. Women in Uganda are raped and battered by their intimate partners, while violence, or the threat of violence, prevents them from protecting themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and from freely seeking HIV/AIDS treatment and counseling leaving them vulnerable to infection. Under your leadership, Uganda has a historic opportunity to remedy this chronic and devastating problem.

It is horrifying that Ugandan women are forced to remain in abusive relationships that expose them to sexual intercourse with HIV infected men, because they have no rights to property and are unable to live independently. Traditional practices such as widow inheritance also expose women to unprotected and unwanted sex with HIV-positive partners. These devastating practices violate women’s human rights, doom development efforts, and undermine the fight against HIV/AIDS. For as long as your government fails in any meaningful way to criminalize or prosecute violence against women in the home, and ignores the role of violence, and, in particular, unwanted sexual relations in marriage, in exposing women to HIV-infection, Ugandan women will continue to die.

The Ugandan government must take immediate steps to eliminate domestic violence and its role in women’s exposure to HIV infection. Among other things, its leaders should:

• Enact and enforce specific laws prohibiting domestic violence;

• address domestic violence by changing discriminatory laws and customs that encourage the subjugation of women in the home and improving legal protections for women’s equal marital and property rights;

• launch public awareness campaigns about domestic violence and its role in exposing women to HIV infection;

• provide training for law enforcement and medical officials in appropriate responses to domestic violence and ensure that domestic violence is fully investigated, prosecuted, and punished;

• implement programs to prevent and redress domestic violence;

• ensure the inclusion of the specific needs of women at risk of HIV infection in broader national HIV/AIDS programming; and

• speak out publicly on the role of domestic violence in transmitting HIV to women.

For the sake of Ugandan women, I urge you to put domestic violence against women and its impact on HIV transmission high on your agenda.

Sincerely,