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| An empty message (Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko) |
South Africa’s health
department will launch a project to “wean” young women off sugar daddies, in
its latest bid to stop the spread of HIV. The US$180 million project will focus on
young women aged 15 to 24 and the usually older men who are “infecting and
impregnating them,” said health minister Aaron Motsoaledi.
Quartz
Africa report continues:
The
project’s five objective include decreasing gender-based violence, keeping
girls in school and increasing economic opportunities for young women. The
programme is funded by PEPFAR, the
White House’s AIDS relief, the German development agency GIZ and
other South African government departments that will also participate in the
project.
South
Africa has had the world’s largest HIV/AIDS treatment and counseling program
since 2009 said Motsoaledi, reducing the disease’s deadly reach, but young
women have been beyond this grasp.
“We
realized that all our successes about HIV/AIDS are about biomedical
interventions. When it comes to behavioral interventions we are really facing
an uphill battle,” Motsoaledi told a local radio station, adding that the 15-24 year-old women
were giving the ministry a “tough time.”
Girls
in this demographic are eight times more likely to be HIV positive. In 14
southern and East African countries, studies show that there are as many as
5,000 new infections each week in this age group, half of them occurring in
South Africa, said the minister.
Weaning
young women from their dangerous sugar daddies will include setting up projects
in regions with high HIV-prevalence that will include family planning and
making clinics “youth friendly,” Motsoaledi describes. The aim is also to talk
to talk to older men who date young women, and encourage them to get tested for
AIDS and explore an older dating pool.
“In most, most, most, most times the reason
there are those relationships are because of gender imbalance and economic
imbalance,” said Motsoaledi. But that economic and gender imbalance doesn’t
only occur among impoverished young women and much older men. The phenomenon of
“blessers”—
a trend that evolved from social media’s #blessed tag and for which there is
now an app and a weekly
social club in South Africa—shows educated young women struggling to
support themselves and their families and turning to men of any age to foot the
bill in exchange for sex.
In
2012, South African health officials first began spreading the message that
transactional sex was one of the leading causes of HIV, with large billboards
plastered all over KwaZulu-Natal, the province with the highest HIV prevalence.
Critics dismissed it as a moralizing message, that was supported by little
correlating evidence and instead by the “yuckiness” of older men having sex with much younger
women. Similar moralizing messages have also failed, as the US learned after spending billions in Africa
telling people to abstain from sex.
This
anti-sugar daddy message harks to an era of AIDS messaging that was premised on
putting the fear of death into people oversimplifying a much more nuanced
issue, says Tessa Dooms, head of the non-governmental organization Youth Lab. Those slogans
didn’t work either and were soon dropped for more life-affirming messages.
Educating
young women and giving them jobs is not enough to empower them if the society
they live in places little value in women already, says Dooms. Women in South
Africa are often exposed to subliminal message that their worth comes from
their relation to men, rather than their own strengths and abilities.
“The
empowerment of young women is not enough. What it is, is a culture of
patriarchy and gender roles that makes it acceptable and encouraging for women
to depend on men,” said Dooms. “This is about access to sex but it’s also about
access to control over young women’s bodies and control over their economic
futures.”
Approaching the problem from the point of HIV prevention is not enough, she says, what it needs is a social overhaul that may take another generation. Source: Quartz Africa
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