BY ARTIST+ MEMBER IMH

1. Women who seek to be financially sufficient often are met with unsurmountable obstacles that prevent them from being financially solvent and that make them vulnerable to multiple factors of decreased access to safety and security.

2. Women who seek to create sustainable funding are often denied loans because they do not qualify for funding based on lack of credit developed and/or other factors that prevent them from securing funding.

3. Women in the USA who are in need of benefits are often kept in a cycle of poverty because while they are encouraged to own a home they are not allowed to maintain more than $2,000 a month in a bank or cannot participate in educational development without running the risk of losing their benefits.

4. Women who work as independent asserting their rights to self-empowerment are often stigmatized as not being ’productive’ and (are not perceived as a viable part of the workforce) without taking into consideration the immense obstacles they are faced if they are organization dependent.

5. Silencing them is increased when they and others in their communities lack literacy about the nature of what violence entails. 1 in 3 women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence and/or experience various forms of domestic violence. Girls and boys are exposed to school related violence daily.

6. Even though the face of HIV/AIDS has changed, little accounts for the fact that child bearing women who did not have children from the early generation decrease the generation of their bloodlines. Additionally their “mental health” and issues of trauma are reinforced when faced with these same issues of loss.

7. The human rights of all women are erased when their contributions are not considered as ones worth supporting and often at the expense of another and/or gender-based, “faith”, class, race, sexual cultural identity, and social and health status.

8. Displacement of women and men often leaves them without making choices that are safe for their families such as childbearing, and thus having a family or not can create a lack of access to economic stability.

9. Stigma and oppressive conditions that demean and isolate are often factors that disrupt the quality of their daily survival and lack of access to resources dissuades advancement for equality and decreases their opportunities towards self development and this inherently denies them their own sense of agency for growth and self empowerment.

10. Silences occur at multiple sites where power dynamics of oppression disenfranchises when a woman or developing young girls or their family (presuming she has a family or has been abused in various forms) when not given equal access because she or he has been stigmatized even though she or he contributes to the impending needs of their lives and community, their presence counts.

TEN POINTS encourages 10 minutes of reflection/visualizing and voicing the needs of ALL women, young girls and adult women and also for a Cure.

TEN POINTS is a Collaborative action, an Initiative seeking to help continue raising awareness on various issues communities are faced worldwide with HIV/AIDS. It does not reflect the views of all parties involved but stands in solidarity with community with RADIANT PRESENCE, organized by Visual AIDS. It seeks to help increase the visibility on the rights and access to services that help women with and without families survive, highlighting the needs to decrease violence, psychological, psychic, physical isolation, stigma, multiple forms of silences while enabling them to maintain the balance of power where they otherwise would be further marginalized and disempowered. It is to acknowledge worldwide and domestically the urgency of their needs and to decrease issues of violence in all forms. The dignity of human rights include: access to art, creating safe spaces, venues, critical resources, education, acknowledging their own agency of power, but needs for necessary continued survival, provisions of knowledge, community, family, safe resources, sustainable labor/economics, housing, resourced and development of funding for work, and where necessary, access to developments as conditions that increase their chances for sustained living. 

TEN POINTS is collectively inspired by multiple sources and RADIANT PRESENCE.

Graphic Layout by Theresa T and VANY staff with art illustrated by IMH