‘Safe Sex Can Kill You’ - Ruth Bergan

A friend came to stay with us in Bangalore. He brought many photos with him, some taken from around Pondicherry and some from within the center where he works. Looking through the photos and hearing some of the stories about the people in them was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in India.Yet they are stories that should be told and retold in the hope that more can be done to prevent further stories being played out.

The first photos I saw were of beautiful sunsets and life in Pondicherry. The next ones were more difficult to look at, being interspersed with these. In these there were two photos of an emaciated woman. Not long after she was married her husband had sold her to a pimp who locked her in a tiny room and forced her into prostitution. She had died some minutes before the photo was taken, her death had been the result of contracting the AIDS virus - this is not what will be recorded on her death certificate. When she had begun to show symptoms of illness she was thrown out of the brothel, and had been living on the streets.

My friend works in a centre where they take in HIV and AIDS victims. Many of them will not live very long, but those who do are offered skills training and counselling. At present they are making Christmas cards and trying to start a comic, to be sold in France.

There are two more stories I would like to include in this article. The first is that of a young girl, in one of the photos, of three or four years old. She had large white spots all over her face, one of the signs of full-blown AIDS. Her parents could not be traced; they had sold her to a pimp who would wait until she was a little older before offering her to his customers. Again, when she showed signs of being ill she was thrown out onto the street, where she was found by my friend’s association. Her mother was probably a prostitute and had probably passed the HIV virus on to her. The last story is about a boy who ran away from a difficult home life. He found himself in Bombay where he was picked up by a pimp. He was then castrated and put to work in a brothel. It can’t have been long before he became one of the 80% of Bombay sex workers who have HIV.

These stories speak for themselves and I can’t begin to find the words to express the horror I felt hearing them and seeing the pictures. Yet, aside from centres like the one in Pondicherry, very little is being done to prevent this kind of thing happening. Indeed It can often be very difficult to do anything. Here in Bangalore, DEEDS began an awareness campaign about HIV, but was forced to stop when people in the area became suspicious of DEEDS’ motivation. Rumours about catching HIV simply by touching someone affected, amongst others, were spreading. My friend wanted to talk to the people here about his work, but because there are so many of these rumours and so much suspicion, we felt that the DEEDS project might be jeopardized, and therefore decided that it wouldn’t be appropriate.

The reason the woman in the first photo would not have AIDS or HIV written as the cause of death on her certificate is that the Indian government do not permit it. This kind of refusal to face the problem renders meaningless their figure of 4.2 million cases of HIV, an incredible number in itself. At a lower level the government has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo: many government officials are making a tidy profit from prostitution rackets.

The government is doing very little to raise awareness of the problem within the country as a whole. Many of the victims in the Pondicherry center believe that they have been cursed by God. A large proportion of high caste people still believe their status makes them immune from such diseases, and in the villages women still trust people from the cities who come in offering them good, well-paid jobs.

As a final affront to all those who have contracted HIV, I found a leaflet yesterday, produced by the Indian pro-life movement, entitled ‘Safe Sex Can Kill You’. According to this leaflet condoms have pores in them which allow the HIV virus to pass through, “using a condom is like using a broken umbrella in the rain…”. The leaflet also talks about the dangers of sex before marriage: a damaged reputation, an unhappy marriage, “having sex before marriage is like giving away all your Christmas presents in July…”. What message is this conveying? That if condoms aren’t safe, why bother using them? And after all, as long as you only have sex after marriage you will be fine!