Risky Sex, Safe Relationships: Sex and the Transition to Adulthood in Malawi

• In Event: 592 - Regular Session. Social Dimensions of Aids

Abstract

Classic approaches to HIV prevention, based on public health research and communicated through life skills education, assume that safer sex practices (abstinence, faithfulness, condom use) provide protection and do not create additional risk for young people. This obscures the protective effects that intimate and sexual relationships, an integral part of which is unprotected sex, offers young women during their transition to adulthood. Based on qualitative research with young people in Malawi, I argue that unprotected sex helps young women create strong relationships through symbolic, institutional and material connections with men. Such relationships are essential for adolescent girls to become respectable adult women – no longer materially dependent on their parents and with at least one child. Safer sex, especially condoms and abstinence, prevent the formation of such relationships and thus put young women at risk of remaining unmarried and childless spinsters – a future “worse than AIDS”.

Author

• Anais Bertrand-Dansereau, Centre for Population Dynamics