The Honorable Condoleeza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, N.W., 7th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20520, USA
Fax: 202-261-8577
E-mail: Secretary@state.gov

[Date]

Dear Secretary Rice:

I am gravely concerned about domestic violence and its impact on women’s vulnerability to HIV infection. Millions of women around the world 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.

In many countries, 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 in some countries 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. Many governments fail in any meaningful way to criminalize or prosecute violence against women in the home, and ignore the role of violence, and, in particular, unwanted sexual relations in marriage, in exposing women to HIV-infection.

The U.S. government must play a critical role in eliminating domestic violence and its role in women’s exposure to HIV infection as it promotes women’s human rights and economic development. It should:

• provide development assistance in ways that promote greater protection of women’s legal marital and property rights;

• urge governments to address domestic violence by changing discriminatory laws and customs and imposing criminal sanctions on those who batter and rape women in the home;

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

• urge governments to adopt and enforce legal sanctions against perpetrators of domestic violence;

• help to develop governmental and NGO programs to address domestic violence and HIV/AIDS; and

• speak out publicly on the role of domestic violence in transmitting HIV to women, support the adoption and enforcement of laws specifically prohibiting domestic violence, and emphatically condemn discriminatory laws and customs that encourage the subjugation of women in the home.

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

Sincerely,