London ? The women’s rights movement and the AIDS movement must come together if the world is to ultimately win the fight against HIV, the United Nations said in a report released Tuesday.

Women and girls in the developing world are increasingly becoming its main victims, but current safe-sex prevention strategies are of little use to the millions who don’t have the power to say no to sex or to insist on condom use.

The inequality women face — from poverty and stunted education, to rape and denial of women’s inheritance and property rights — is a major obstacle to victory over the virus, according to the latest global HIV status report published by UNAIDS.

The core of HIV prevention is advice to abstain from sex until marriage, be faithful and to use condoms.

“The prevention strategies now in place are missing the point when it comes to women and girls,” Dr. Kathleen Cravero, deputy chief of UNAIDS told a news conference. “We are finding in most regions of the world, they simply do not have the economic and social power or choices, or control over their lives to put that information into practice.”

Nearly 50 percent of the 39.4 million people infected with HIV worldwide are women. In regions where the epidemic has been raging for years, more women are infected than men, and in countries where epidemics are just beginning, new infections among women outnumber those among men and the gap continues to widen.

East Asia experienced the sharpest increase in the number of women infected with HIV in the past two years — 56 percent. Eastern Europe and Central Asia come next, with infections among women rising 48 percent in the past two years. In the Caribbean, which is the second-worst hit area of the world after sub-Saharan Africa, young women are twice as likely as men their age to become infected.

Part of the reason for the rapid increase is that it is physically easier for women to get HIV through intercourse.

AIDS has to be the catalyst for women’s rights in the developing world, UNAIDS chief Dr. Peter Piot said.

“There was reason enough before AIDS, but now the link between the whole gender inequality and death has never been so direct as with AIDS,” Piot said. “If AIDS is not enough to shift the agenda for women, then what is enough?”