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4 –
Daily Update
– Wednesday 12 June 2013
‘We have to make sure women can get
treatment – we’re empowering them to
fight,’ said Susan Masanja, in a session
on developing harm reduction services
for women who use drugs.
The fight was against blood-borne
viruses, poverty and stigma in Tanzania,
where injecting drug use was on the
increase, more than a third of IDUs had HIV,
and women frequently reported violence and
rape. The socio-economic condition of many
women who used drugs was poor, she said,
with homelessness and lack of income
making it difficult to access harm reduction
services. Médecins du Monde’s special
focus on women had been effective in
extending outreach, peer educator training
and women-only initiatives, resulting in
evidence of the first changes in behaviour.
‘We need to extend outreach services to
more locations and days a week and
continue income-generating services,’ she
said, alongside calling for additional
specialist training for medical personnel.
‘We need to keep spreading harm
reduction and strengthen advocacy.’
Visvanathan Arumugam shared
experience from the Chanura Kol project in
Manipur, India. Around 60 per cent of
registered female injecting drug users were
engaged in paid sex work he said, and there
were no government-funded targeted
interventions. The project, implemented in
three districts in Manipur and funded by the
Elton John AIDS Foundation,
provided comprehensive
community-based harm reduction
services for women who used
drugs, including positive living
education and lifestyle advice,
preventative measures, testing
and follow-up services.
The outcomes were positive,
with better education, more testing
and an increase in the number of
women who had successfully
completed detoxification treatment. The
project was ‘the way forward, showing the
need for safe spaces for female injecting drug
users and access to harm reduction’, he said.
‘Drug use differs greatly between
genders,’ said Vlatko Dekov from
Macedonia, who offered insights on
integrating a gendered perspective into
harm reduction programmes. ‘One of the
reasons for this is the gender roles in
society,’ he said. ‘Men have the decision-
making positions and women have more
frequent roles in the private sphere.’
Women tended to be invisible in
treatment programmes in the Balkans, he
said, only becoming visible in life-threatening
situations such as overdose. There was also
a gender hierarchy in drug-taking, with
women’s injecting frequently initiated and
continued by men. Making harm reduction
gender sensitive depended on involving
women who use drugs in the political
decision-making process, he suggested,
using their expertise to design services and
including them on the staff of harm reduction
programmes. On a day-to-day level, women
should be encouraged to become more
independent, he said, through education,
job-seeking, training and employment.
Claudia Stoicescu told delegates that the
HRI report,
The Global State of Harm
Reduction
, gave a comprehensive overview
of the risks to women who used drugs,
including guidance on gender-sensitive
services. ‘Services should be tailored to the
documented needs of women in different
contexts,’ she said, pointing out that small
additions to services could be effective in
changing such behaviour as women’s
dependence on their partners.
‘Women who use drugs should always
be involved in the design of programmes to
make sure they’re respectful and
appropriate,’ she added.
Empower women
through ‘respectful and
appropriate’ services
The Harm Reduction International conference has given a great opportunity to
the European Harm Reduction Network (EuroHRN) to launch its second phase of
activities for the period 2013-14,
writes Cinzia Brentari
.
EuroHRN aims to reduce the health and social harms related to drug use and
the drug policy environment by promoting the human rights and health of people
who use drugs through collective advocacy, research and information exchange.
The second phase of the network will focus on more concrete work on
overdose and drug-related deaths, with research, mapping and advocacy
through peer involvement on overdose prevention. Revitalising evidence,
discussions and networking around drug consumption rooms will be one of the
key areas of work.
The network will also continue to involve key policymakers at local, national
and European level. Do you want to join the network or find out more about
what we do?
Get involved through www.eurohrn.eu
‘Services should be tailored
to the needs ofwomen in
different contexts.’
CLAUDIA STOICESCU