U.N. Dispatch: New Study Reveals How A Specific Colonial Legacy Determines Female HIV Rates in Africa
Mark Leon Goldberg, editor of the U.N. Dispatch, discusses results from a study showing “the legacy of the legal system of a country’s former colonizer has a significant effect on HIV rates in the country. … [C]ountries that use the common law system have significantly higher female HIV rates compared to countries that adopted the civil law tradition. … There is a large volume of academic literature that measures women’s social and economic empowerment against various health outcomes. But this is the first paper to correlate the common law legal system and its historically weak property protections for married women to HIV prevalence” (2/21).