This article explores the connections between sexual violence, gender inequality, and HIV transmission. Beginning with the premise that HIV/AIDS is a gendered pandemic, the article demonstrates the ways that patterns of HIV transmission are structured by gender and social inequalities. This is due in part to the ways in which women's sexual and reproductive health choices are dominated by socio‐cultural expectations and impacted by women's subordinate status in society. Using a country case study from Malawi, Africa, this research demonstrates how the nature and scale of sexual violence impacts both on women's vulnerability to HIV infection and on women's sexual and reproductive health rights. In particular, the article focuses on the conceptualization of sexual violence, the transaction of sex within the local economy and fish industry, and the construction of sex and sexuality as this influences cultural practices and women's vulnerability to HIV transmission. This research finds that Malawian women are situated in a social, legal, and political‐economic environment that sustains unequal gender power relations that tolerate the perpetuation of violence against women and leave them more vulnerable to HIV infection and the infringement of their sexual and reproductive health rights.

In recent years, community laws to address harmful practices affecting women and girls in rural Malawi have been forming under the leadership of traditional authorities (chiefs), plural justice system actors who usually are suspected by international human rights law and jurisprudence of being on the side of women's rights violations. Yet, being community engineered, the community laws have some potential to practically protect women and girls from harmful practices. Taking off from a 'norm internalisation' conceptual footing, this article closely examines how the phenomenon of community laws sits with the expectations of international human rights law and jurisprudence on measures that states ought to take to internalise norms protecting women and girls from harmful practices. The article establishes that international human rights law and jurisprudence is saturated with calls for states to prioritise formal and macro-level measures to address harmful practices, although latest jurisprudence at both United Nations and African Union levels has cautiously begun to also recognise the role of plural justice systems. The article argues that it is high time that the human rights treaty-monitoring bodies started to critically re-examine the high insistence on formal measures, given that the community laws, which are also internalising the norm protecting women from harmful practices, are manifesting at the level of chiefs' jurisdictions.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Érès. © Érès. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.