Philippine Journal

October 13, 1998

Women Chat

Aida F. Santos

AIDS and Sarah Jane (Part 1)

Where is Sarah Jane? Sarah Jane, the PWA (person with AIDS) who made the illness also a form of rebellion, has not been covered by media for a while.  What remains in the memory is the feisty, sometimes loud-mouthed but certainly strong woman who broke many expectations and cultural taboos.  First, despite having the dreaded virus, she had herself tattooed and pierced.  As the virus travels and transmits its deadly sting through the blood stream, health myths said that she was being risque.  Then she sloped and eventually lived in with a young man who looked like a younger brother beside her.  Then she capped the whole thing by engaging in unprotected sex and got pregnant.  Finally, she gave birth to a child. 

She was a difficult person to be with, said some of her co-PWAs.  She was too bold and caused uproar.  Her credibility became untenable for her to continue as a PWA peer educator.  The public image of the DOH’s model educator was losing credibility.  For all that the public may think of her, she was undeniably, something else. But she was, whether we accept it or not, not just her own person.  She was in many ways a media creation.

When the AIDS pandemic hit the Philippines, the responses were culturally expected. The religious prayed and decided to call it a heaven-sent plague to punish the sinners, i.e., the homosexuals and prostituted women and girls in prostitution. Policy makers filed bills calling for the adoption of official “redlight” districts to monitor women in prostitution.  Police raided and closed down bars, “entertainment” establishments and arrested the women.  Foreigners and tourists were blamed and tighter immigration policies were instituted.  The academe drew up research proposals.  “Horror” advertisements  and public notices were raised.  AIDS funds trickled into the country, and not long after, AIDS-focused organizations were entrenched in the NGO movement, with a few holding money bags that were simply dreams for many generalist or issue-based development NGOs.

Women’s NGOs entered the scene of AIDS intervention in the context of women’s empowerment.  In fact, to date, women’s groups which have AIDS programs or projects are not necessarily or primarily medically oriented.  HIV/AIDS programming usually come under concerns such as women’s health, reproductive health and rights, gender equality and structural issues.

Scientists and scholars on AIDS have argued that the “assumptions of the biomedical model as embodied in the paradigms of gay plague and chronic disease have shaped scientific knowledge about AIDS as well as the medical and public health responses to this epidemic,” according to Elizabeth Fee and Nancy Krieger, authors of “Understanding AIDS: Historical Interpretations and the Limits of Biomedical Individualism.”  The responses were nearly exclusively focused on HIV and the mechanisms of its transmission, rather than  on the social determinants.  Data collection has focused on individuals with or at risk of AIDS, and rarely on the social context of their lives especially in the early days of AIDS programming in the country.  This methodology is called biomedical individualism. Social scientists and AIDS workers have failed to see how social biases affect the type of research questions they ask.

The Philippines programming on HIV/AIDS has been focused on two things: condom distribution and education, and development of peer educators.  But it has been proven that even the best-intentioned prevention campaigns are doomed to fail if they assume that education combined with free condoms and, safe sex are all that is needed to prevent the spread of HIV.  The “just say no” message and warnings against exchanging bodily fluids or sharing needles may not be enough.  Sarah Jane is a case in point. 

Government and non-government organizations working on the issue of AIDS have yet to come together in a more systematic fashion to critically evaluate and plan together in order to push our work into a higher ground, imbued with lessons from which we can bring greater light into a more comprehensive understanding of HIV and related structural concerns.  

It has been reported that Sarah Jane is in the national mental hospital.  For what reasons, no one can be that certain.  Her rebelliousness, and some say, often manifested in violent behaviors, plus her come-what-may attitude probably combined to bring her to this stage in her life. But being committed to the mental hospital?  That is something I wonder about. 

Did we really understand her? 

Sarah Jane is one of the greatest lessons on HIV intervention programs. And I am sure she isn’t only the one. 

***