Sex workers and AIDS

Out of the third International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has come a piece of news that deserves our attention. As has been reported, sex workers and support groups from 20 counties in this region, including Indonesia, agreed in a side meeting in Chiang Mai to set up a network to respond to allegations that prostitutes are spreading the deadly Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

As was pointed out by Kartini Salmah, an activist of the Malaysian sex workers support organization Ikhlas, "sex work" is truly a community issue and therefore anti-AIDS campaigns would do a good deal better targeting people's behavior, rather than singling out prostitutes as a main cause of the spread of AIDS, particularly in Asia and other countries of the Third World.

We believe that the threat AIDS poses to societies is well recognized in this region. The specter of certain death on such a massive scale aside, the warning by Myo Thant, a senior economist with the Asian Development Bank, deserves to be heeded. The enormous cost of fighting the disease, according to Myo Thant, is threatening economic development in Asia. "Let there be no misunderstanding. The AIDS epidemic is the enemy of Asian economic progress," Thant warned.

The task of fighting AIDS in this region is gigantic. Given the turn which the spread of AIDS is taking at present, experts are predicting that by the turn of this century, which is only a few years away, Asia and the Pacific will be overtaking the African continent as the epicenter of the lethal disease. By the year 2000, it is forecast that this region will account for some 25 percent of all cases of HIV cases worldwide.

Such a development would obviously complicate things enormously. As more funds would be needed to counter the spreading epidemic, growth would slow down, not to mention the strain which the disease may place on the human resources of the countries concerned.

Meanwhile, the difficulties which public health workers and anti-AIDS activists face are numerous and include many aspects, including the cultural and traditional perspectives. Measures that would have to be taken on purely rational considerations -- such as promoting the use of condoms -- often cannot be taken because of such considerations. And of course, while the disease has already assumed the proportions of a national health threat, many governments lack the huge funds needed to conduct an effective anti-AIDS campaign.

Under such circumstances it is not difficult to see that many people are looking for scapegoats. And obviously one of the easiest groups to target is sex workers since it is widely understood that casual sexual relations are one of the main ways the disease is spread.

However, there can be no denying that sex work is a community issue. In the fight against AIDS everybody must become involved and that includes not only government, social workers and activists, but also the sex workers' clients and brothel operators.

If there is one thing the new network could do to help fight the spreading AIDS epidemic in their midst, it is by promoting this insight among as many people as possible, even while placing the emphasis of its work on promoting the rights of sex workers. Hopefully, this will help promote better, safer conduct among people, which is at present perhaps still the only way to counter the disease.