June 21 is Father’s Day and this year it is being commemorated at a time when several countries have adopted the One–Love Campaign, a campaign that seeks to promote faithfulness within relationships.
This campaign is regional  and countries like South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho and Zimbabwe are implementing it.

The reason why so many countries in southern Africa have adopted the One-Love Campaign is because international organisations such as UNAIDS and regional bodies like Southern African Development Community (SADC) recognise that multiple concurrent partnerships are a key driver to the spread of HIV in southern Africa. The practice is widespread throughout the region and has been cited as one of the reasons why HIV prevalence is higher in southern Africa than other region in the world.

Multiple concurrent partnerships refer to the practice where men and women have more than one sexual relationship at the same time. These relationships vary in nature and meaning, ranging from one night stands with a sex worker, a stranger, or even a friend: to long-term relationships often referred to in Zimbabwe and other southern African countries as “small houses” or “spare wheels.”  

Key Issues for the media:

• As the world honours fathers for their role of home builders, as protectors, providers and as decision-makers and the ones African society looks up to, to provide direction for the family - the media needs to challenge men to use this powerful role they have within the community responsibly. No risky sexual behaviour, no child abuse and no wife battering for a man who wants to be called a “father.”

• There is need for the media to educate today’s man that notions of manhood handed down from generation to generation are not necessarily the best in this era of HIV and AIDS. Some men keep “small houses” because it is deeply entrenched in them that a real man cannot be content with one woman. There is need to correct this misconception by promoting further the “one love” concept and highlighting the positive results that men can derive from having a faithful relationship with one partner

• The media needs to use Father’s Day to highlight through its coverage, that while any man can have a child, it takes substance to be the kind of father that children and society can honour. If you are an absent father, the father who only sees their child during holidays and weekends, is that the best you can do?

•  It is on record that men are largely hesitant to find out their HIV status compared to their female counterparts. The media can use this Father’s Day to call on men to go and get tested and to accompany their wives and partners when they go for tests, before and during pregnancy.

• The media can also look into issues of gender-based violence during this time, which are mostly perpetrated by men against their female counterparts. There is need to celebrate those men who do not abuse women, the models of real men that should be promoted in our communities. Let such men’s voices be heard through stories and programmes so that others can learn from them.

• While women constitute the higher percentage of people living with HIV in Africa at 60 percent, men are also living with HIV. This would be an ideal time to let the voices of men living with HIV or men caring for partners who are living with HIV, be heard. That way we will encourage men to learn from each other.

• In this time when we have many Orphaned and other vulnerable children (OVC) in our midst, there is a shortage of men who can act as powerful and positive role models and mentors with grandmothers, aunts, matrons and female school teachers stepping in most of the time. There is need to advocate through coverage for more involvement of male relatives in the upbringing of OVC, not just a material providers but people who spend time with children. 

• Within the media fraternity, we also have fathers. Let this time serve as a time of introspection, of improving communication with loved ones and doing our best to be the best parents we can be. The mediadesk wishes all of us who are fathers and father figures a Happy Father’s Day

Sources:

SAfAIDS Changing the River’s Flow Series
www.mediaresourcedesk.org
www.holidays.net/dates
www.loveyoufather.com