Premarital sexual experience is increasing in Bangladesh; it would become vulnerable of HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS and Bangladesh

Premarital sexual experience is increasing in Bangladesh; it would become vulnerable of HIV/AIDS.

- Ms. Muslema Khan Bulon - - AIDS Researcher - - bulon.email@gmail.com -

Nowadays AIDS, constitute a significant public health threat around the world. By the end of 2005, about 50 million people worldwide were living with HIV/AIDS, 90% of them in developing countries. During 2005 alone, a total of 5 million adults and children were found to be newly infected with HIV, and in the same year, three million people died from HIV/AIDS - 80% of them Africans. In two decades, AIDS has killed almost 30 million people and orphaned over 14 million children.

An increase in affluence also has resulted in a rise in the number of men who visit commercial sex workers. HIV/AIDS in Bangladesh therefore depends on the conditions in the commercial sex industry, including the frequency of the incidents of men visiting commercial sex workers. Providing clean needles is also considered important because it decreases the spread of HIV from injection drug-users. It is also important to bring a behavioural change among commercial sex workers (CSWs) by promoting the use of condom.

The fourth National Surveillance helps to understand us, the on going sexual status in our society, we found, our hotel sex workers conduct 44 clients in a week; both of them clients are married & unmarried. So it is clearly that Premarital and Extramarital sex is increasing in our cultural. While, everyone buying sex in Bangladesh is having unprotected sex some of the time and a large majority don’t use condoms regularly. Of 500 injection drug users questioned in central Bangladesh during the surveillance, 93.4 percent said they had shared needles in last week. The National Surveillance also found a high prevalence of syphilis among female sex workers. The same street-based sex workers in central Bangladesh who had a 0.5 percent prevalence of HIV, for example, had a 42.7 percent prevalence of syphilis.

Women in Bangladesh are largely getting sexual experience through marriage and for the most part, premarital sexual contact is mostly confined to their future husband or lovers. “Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation” found, sexual behaviour among Bangladeshi women is changing. Adolescent girls may not remain in the traditional sexual confinement of the previous generations and casual sex among them is on the rise. This may encourage AIDS to acquire alarming proportions in Asia.

The opinion of AIDS researcher Mohammad Khairul Alam, about the cause of changing of human behaviour is “the mixed effect of urbanization and modernization has brought frustration in the man. For these two things people are forgetting traditional social norms, family sexual behaviour is changing, attitudes of peoples towards sex is changing very fast. Besides migration for jobs, an increasing number of women taking up jobs outside the home, a decline in the traditional joint family system, and conflict to global culture were considered to have contributed to this phenomenon.”

Globally, there has been a changing pattern of male/female infections. Early cases in many countries were concentrated in male homosexuals and injection/intravenous drug users. But as the pandemic has spread there has been a progressive shift towards heterosexual transmission and increasing infection rates in women. The reality today is that, globally, more female than male are now dying of HIV/AIDS, and the age patterns of infection are significantly different for the two sexes.

Gender analysis is crucial to understanding HIV/AIDS transmission and initiating appropriate programmes of action. Key to this is an understanding of the socially constructed aspects of male-female relations that underpin individual behaviour, as well as the gender-based rules, norms and laws governing the broader social and institutional context.

References: Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation, World Bank

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