One of the protagonists of Balka, a film which follows the lives of women struggling with drug use and HIV in Ukraine. Source: Open Society Foundations.
On International Women’s Day in early March, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published a report stating there is an “urgent need” to increase HIV treatment and prevention for women and girls around the world. “Girls and women are still bearing the brunt of the AIDS epidemic,” Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, laments in the report’s introduction, pointing to stigma, discrimination and violence as factors that make women more vulnerable to HIV than men.
