By TaRessa Stovall

A trio of new products designed to protect against rape and STDs, especially HIV/AIDS, raises questions about the gaps and conflicts between scientific progress, lifestyle logistics and human nature. These recent developments also call into question the age-old role of Black bodies as test sites for potential progress.

On June 20, news broke of a “condom with teeth,” invented by a South African woman doctor to help prevent rapes in South Africa, which Human Rights Watch reports as having “the highest rates in the world of rape reported to the police. A survey released in June by the Medical Research Council of South Africa found that 28 percent of men surveyed had raped a woman or girl; one in 20 said they had raped a woman or girl in the past year. Arrest and conviction rates of rape perpetrators are extremely low … Women and girls who have been raped face numerous obstacles in accessing healthcare and other forms of assistance, such as delays in the provision of medical treatment, an absence of counseling services, and lengthy waits for medico-legal examination.”

The inventor of the anti-rape device, Rape-aXe, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers, spent 40 years and sold her home and car to finance the development of the latex condom which is inserted like a tampon and has jagged rows of teeth-like hooks to grab a man’s penis during penetration. CNN reported that, “Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest. “It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it’s on,” she said. “If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter… however, it doesn’t break the skin, and there’s no danger of fluid exposure.” The doctor planned to distribute 30,000 of the devices free to women during the World Cup,

Ehlers said she planned to distribute 30,000 free devices under supervision during the World Cup which was appropriate, according to Mother Jones which predicted that “about 317 South African women [could have been] raped during one 90-minute game.”

While there are criticisms of and potential problems with the use of the condom—that it is a form of “enslavement,” reminds women of their vulnerability, and puts them at risk from attacks by the trapped rapists, it is notable that (1) the need for something—anything—to stem the tide of sexual violence is so desperate that the Rape-aXe seems better than nothing in many cases; and (2) one woman has essentially devoted her career to fashioning this device, inspired by a long-ago conversation with a rape victim who said she “wished she had teeth down there.”

“Women take drastic measures to prevent rape in South Africa,” Ehlers said, “with some wearing extra tight biker shorts and others inserting razor blades wrapped in sponges in their private parts,” CNN reported.

Of course, sexual violence is just one factor in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and while effective rape prevention might require more than dangerous latex, strides are being made in the fight to slow the spread of STDs.

On July 9 came reports of scientific “proof” to bolster hopes of an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “in the latest development, U.S. government scientists say they have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91 percent of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered … The HIV antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally. The trick for scientists now is to develop a vaccine or other methods to make anyone’s body produce them as well.

The findings, released in the July 8 issue of Science Express, just before the 18th International AIDS Conference, held July 18-23 in Vienna, Austria, have prompted a kind of cautious optimism in medical professionals. WEB MD Health News warns that while “It’s major news that humans are capable of making antibodies that neutralize the AIDS virus … finding antibodies—even such powerful antibodies as these—is not the same as finding a vaccine capable of eliciting the antibodies. It will be years, at least, before the discovery leads to a vaccine that can be tested in people.”

And when it is ready for testing, who will be the guinea pigs? Since black people, in sub-Saharan Africa and the USA, suffer most disproportionately from HIV/AIDS, it’s a fair guess that we’ll be the focus of testing. But will it be with our full knowledge and consent, with the necessary protections in place?

One need only utter the words “Tuskegee Experiment” to African-American adults in the US to understand the necessity of that concern. The Centers for Disease Control describes the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, as “a 40-year nightmare in which hundreds of black men were lied to, subjected to experimentation without informed consent and denied adequate treatment.” Any black person alive when news of the debacle broke in 1972 might be excused for feeling reluctant to join the front lines of testing the efficacy of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.

It doesn’t help to recall a 2007 report that testing of the HIV vaccine developed by Merck for large clinical trials in North and South America, the Caribbean, Australia, and a similar study in South Africa, were “halted because the vaccine appeared to be increasing the risk of HIV infection,” according to Healthy Highlights.

Still with HIV/AIDS ravaging black communities in this country and abroad, perhaps attitudes will change once the latest vaccine is available for testing.

The need is profound, especially since HIV rates seem to correspond to poverty. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on HIV in impoverished urban areas said that, “First, the study tells us that when other racial ethnic groups face the same social determinants of health as blacks–the social and economic conditions within which they live and that impact their well being–their HIV rates rise to similar levels as those of blacks, even for whites, whose rate of infection is normally substantially lower than rates for both blacks and Latinos. It also confirms what the Black AIDS Institute and many AIDS activists have been saying all along: that a generalized epidemic exists within many black communities. The HIV rates in U.S. poverty areas rival the rates found in Haiti, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Angola.”

And, as with sexual violence, South Africa seems to be a kind of ground zero for the HIV/AIDS tsunami as well. According to the international AIDS charity, AVERT, “An estimated 5.7 million people were living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa in 2009, more than in any other country. It is believed that in 2008, over 250,000 South Africans died of AIDS. National prevalence is around 11%, with some age groups being particularly affected. Almost one in three women aged 25-29, and over a quarter of men aged 30-34, are living with HIV.”

But there may be another alternative, at least for women. On July19, news spread of a vaginal gel with an AIDS drug that, when used over a long period of time, seems to halve a woman’s chances of contracting HIV from an infected partner. The gel was tested on 889 heterosexual women in and around Durban, South Africa. The result: 38 of the women using the gel contracted HIV, compared to 60 in the control group.

As the Boston Herald reported, “’It’s the first time we’ve ever seen any microbicide give a positive result that you could say was statistically significant,’ said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who presented results of the South African study at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna. The results [of the study] need to be confirmed, and scientists disagree about whether this amount of protection is enough to justify using the gel now. But it is the first hope of protection for women if their partners refuse to use condoms.”

This “first hope of protection” has to be used for years to be effective. And while mild diarrhea was the only side effect noted in the study, the long-term effects of applying an AIDS drug topically for long stretches of time remain to be seen.

As science continues to hustle for solutions to epidemics of sexual violence and disease, we cannot ignore the politics of black bodies used as testing grounds, while the prevalence of these problems makes it likely that we will, in fact, continue to be guinea pigs for the foreseeable future.

The New York Times’ top cover story on July 20 said that “2 African Studies Give Women Hope in Fighting H.I.V.” next to a large color picture of worried-looking black South African women who had been participants in the gel study, listening to the results. Their expressions of resignation and despair leap off the page. While The Times story described “cheers erupting when researchers unveiled their findings to a small group of scientists last month in Durban,” there is no sign of cheer, hope, or even a speck of the most cautious optimism on the faces of the women in the photo as they await the results of the trial.

Along with the vaginal gel, The Times story describes a new Unaids study which “found that HIV. prevalence among young people had declined by more than 25 percent in 15 of the 21 countries most affected by AIDS … [when parents of]teenage girls and young women [in Malawi] were paid $4 to $10 a month while the girls themselves received $1 to $5 a month if they attended school regularly.” The point of the study was to “’empower these girls to make better choices,’” according to Berk Ozler, a senior economist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

Cash. Condoms with vise-like grips. Vaginal gels. Risky vaccines. All are at war with the darker side of human nature, of predators and lovers, of victims and willing partners alike. These are the faces and the bodies we must keep top of mind when considering these various options and the studies about their development. While there are obviously no inexpensive, easy or perfect solutions, we must always consider the psyches and the minds of the people whose bodies are modern-day proving grounds for scientific research, and battle grounds for sexual safety, health, and in far too many cases, life itself.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline.