Gender Constructs and Women's Vulnerability to HIV

The three presentations at this session show how power relations, both in dyadic interactions and in a more structural way, affect children and young people in sex work settings. Because of poverty, parents in Battambang, Cambodia, send their children into work in Thailand, often knowing that it involves sex work. Boys and young men in Bangalore, India, some identifying as kothis (ethnological transgender men, sometimes castrated) usually as a result of abuse and/or coercive sex by adults, end up in prostitution. Their problems form a complicated and tangled matrix ranging from low self-esteem and the risk of health hazards in illegally conducted castrations to the complex relations with police and the economics of sex trade. Similarly, children of women in the Indian sex industry in Pondicherry, near Chennai, are traumatised and have similar problems to the young male prostitutes just mentioned. These unequal power relations mean that children and young people are often led into sex industry situations and within them into risk behaviour by the inability to protect themselves from adults, be they parents, clients, pimps or other adults. It cannot be assumed that the family is always and necessarily a safe haven for children in terms of early sexual coercion. Power relations between adults and children, between police and sex workers make it almost impossible for children and young men to have control over their own bodies.