Washington, DC – Congresswoman Barbara Lee today introduced H.R. 4792, the New United States Global HIV Prevention Strategy to Address Women and Girls Act of 2004, legislation that would revise the current HIV Prevention strategy to focus on the needs of women and girls. The majority of the estimated 40 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS throughout the world today are women and girls. In sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls make up 60 percent of those infected with HIV/AIDS.

Lee’s bill would require the President to develop a comprehensive, integrated, and culturally-appropriate HIV prevention strategy for women in each of the countries receiving assistance to combat HIV/AIDS. That approach would include increasing access to female condoms; reducing the incidence of child marriage; reducing violence against women; supporting the development of micro-enterprise; expanding educational opportunities for women and girls; protecting property and inheritance rights; coordinating HIV prevention services with existing health care services; and promoting gender equality.

The legislation would also seek to balance funding for United States HIV prevention initiatives by removing earmarks in last year’s Global AIDS bill that required 33% of prevention funding to go towards undefined “abstinence-until-marriage” programs.

“For a number of reasons, women and girls are biologically, socially, and economically more vulnerable to HIV infection than men,” said Lee. “Our current HIV prevention strategy, however, fails to effectively target the needs of women and girls to their increased vulnerability to HIV.  We have an obligation to better address the specific needs of women in this horrible pandemic.”

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