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Leveraging existing accountability mechanisms for legal and policy action, UNAIDS, UNDP, UN Women and OHCHR jointly organized a briefing of the CEDAW committee on the link between HIV and violence against women.

UNAIDS is supporting a number of actions to highlight the link between violence against women and HIV, as well as the role of the HIV response in overcoming violence against women. These include Country consultations led by the Women Won’t Wait campaign; and a high level panel during the CSW on the linkages between violence against women and HIV.

The UNAIDS Secretariat provided comprehensive support for the 2011 UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AIDS. The resulting Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS: Intensifying our Efforts to Eliminate HIV/AIDS highlights the need to eliminate violence against women.

In September 2009, UNAIDS helped launch and lead a new initiative to prevent sexual violence against girls, which unites the work of five UN agencies with the Clinton Global Initiative and the US Centers for Disease Control, with a particular emphasis on AIDS affected countries. Six countries have begun data collection and programmatic action to strengthen legal and judicial policies as well as health, child protection and community responses to reduce sexual violence.

UNAIDS undertook two reviews focusing on violence against women and AIDS: (1) a review of the gender policies of the three major AIDS financing institutions – the World Bank, the US President’s Emergency Planfor AIDS relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) – with a view towards strengthening harmonization and coordination of approaches; and (2) a review of over 50 national strategic plans on AIDS to ascertain the degree to which gender issues were integrated.

UNAIDS works closely with its co-sponsors (WHO, UNPFA, UNICEF), and partners (UNIFEM, Amnesty International, the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, and others) to better understand and document the linkages between violence against women and AIDS.

In June 2011, UNAIDS presented the findings of the “Scorecard on Gender Equality in National HIV Responses”, which monitors country-level progress on implementing the UNAIDS Agenda for Women and Girls. As of December 2011, 93 countries reported data which show that less than one fifth (18 of 93) of countries have national data on the intersection between gender-based violence and HIV; and 40% (38 of 93) of countries’ health sector policies address gender-based violence.

The UNAIDS Secretariat, together with UN, development partners and civil society, worked to develop a global indicator on “prevalence of recent intimate partner violence”, to raise the political awareness accordingly. The indicator has been included in the Global AIDS Response Progress Reporting for 2012 to enable national reporting on violence in the context of HIV.

The UNAIDS Secretariat is a member and supports the innovative public-private partnership, “Together for Girls”, to end sexual violence against girls, which has initiated additional studies in Kenya and Zimbabwe, to increase awareness on violence.

UNAIDS supported countries to collect data and report on the proportion of ever-married or partnered women aged 15-49 who experienced physical or sexual violence from a male intimate partner in the past 12 months. This was reported for the first time in the 2012 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epidemiology/2012/gr2012/20121120_UNAIDS_Global_Report_2012_en.pdf