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C H A P T E R S E V E N 176 c h A P t e r e i g h t Prostitution, AIDS, and Fatalism i’m a prostitute. that doesn’t mean i like it, but i had no choice after my husband left me. he was beating me. can you imagine being beaten when you’re pregnant? once he beat me so badly that i couldn’t leave the house for five days. now i’ve got a child to raise on my own. we haven’t eaten since yesterday. i haven’t gotten any money for today, so if somebody comes and gives me 500 francs [$0.92], how could i say no to him? Female youth, eighteen years old there is a lot of poverty here. girls are selling their bodies because of that. A girl can sleep with a man for 100 francs [$0.18]. Male youth, age twenty-three People here are not afraid of HIV/AIDS. they think about how to get a job and make some money for food and after that, there is tomorrow. it’s another struggle for another day. Male youth, age twenty-four what prevention? Female youth, twenty-three years old and working as a prostitute, when invited to comment on HIV/AIDS prevention efforts desirable Pariahs The situation facing many urban female youth is desperate. No group of Rwandan youth faces circumstances so grave. Their desperation is tied to limited options and the horrors of life as a prostitute. Many female youth descend into prostitution because they lack alternatives. Many female youth who are not prostitutes appear to be one misfortune away from the descent. While the sample is small, the findings nonetheless spotlight a potentially serious emergency with profound social and public health implications. Due P R O S T I T U T I O N , A I D S , A N D F A T A L I S M 177 to aids, the threat of disaster appears to be affecting a large proportion of male and female youth in Kigali. Prostitution was the most common female youth occupation in the research sample. Although nearly one in three female youth in the research sample were prostitutes, it is entirely possible that the proportion was even higher, since some prostitutes may have concealed their involvement in prostitution because it is illegal and carries the status of social pariah. The average age of female youth respondents working as prostitutes was twenty-one. All were destitute (per the definition in chapter 2).Only one of the twelve had attended secondary school,and 17 percent had never attended any school.Three-quarters were single. The research did not record how many had children, although there were strong indications that most were mothers.Some information was hard to extract: only six female youth who stated their job as “prostitute”would explain how they got to Kigali. Four of those six had followed their husband or boyfriend to the capital and then had been abandoned by those males. Urban support networks beyond their exiting male partners did not seem to exist. At least some prostitutes were victims of regular violence: references to being beaten by customers were common during interviews. Many female youth who worked as prostitutes had visible bruises or scars. Urban youth and adults considered prostitution as a last-chance, no-alternative net that young women fall into and then, in nearly all cases, cannot escape. The entrapment surfaced in responses by prostitutes to the question, “Do you have a plan for improving your situation?”(question 6 in box 2.3).The responses fell into three categories: those without any plans whatsoever (42 percent), those with particularly unrealistic plans (such as getting a rich man to rescue them, which one considered “a dream”) (33 percent), and those with plans for developing a business or returning to school (25 percent)—the last was possible only provided they somehow receive assistance. Those without any plans illustrated the difficulty of finding a getaway. One respondent, for example,stated that “my plan is just to survive from day to day.”Another said that imagining a plan for herself was like a convict serving a life sentence. “Right now, I’m like that prisoner,” she explained. “My life is not going to improve, so why should I waste time thinking about a plan?” While some youth prostitutes described theirs as a chosen occupation, others viewed prostitution as an act...

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