Is levirate marriage (widow inheritance) best understood as a protective custom securing a widow's economic and social standing, or as a practice that can override her own choice and has been directly implicated in HIV transmission in high-prevalence regions?

African public-health and human-rights scholarship is divided: some researchers and communities frame the custom as protection, ensuring a widow and her children retain a male provider within her late husband's kin group, while public-health literature and some African civil-society groups document it as coercive in practice and link it to elevated HIV transmission risk between the inheritor and his co-wives.