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Mental and Social Health Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Mental and Social Health

Injecting Drug Users In India: Understanding Sexual Behaviours And Sexual Networks To Design Effective Behaviour Change Strategies, Avina Sarna, Waimar Tun, Aruna Bhattacharya, Vaishali Sharma Mahendra, Neville Selhore, Arjun Singh, Louis Apicella Jan 2007

Injecting Drug Users In India: Understanding Sexual Behaviours And Sexual Networks To Design Effective Behaviour Change Strategies, Avina Sarna, Waimar Tun, Aruna Bhattacharya, Vaishali Sharma Mahendra, Neville Selhore, Arjun Singh, Louis Apicella

HIV and AIDS

The practice of injecting drug use has been spreading to different parts of India since the early 1980s and is associated with an increase in HIV prevalence rates. Injecting drug users (IDUs) engage in both risky injection and sexual practices that increase the risk for HIV transmission. While risky injection practices are well understood, there is limited understanding of IDUs’ sexual behaviors and social networks. The Population Council conducted a cross-sectional study to explore patterns of risky sexual behaviors, sexual network characteristics, and drivers of high-risk behaviors of IDUs in Delhi and Imphal. The contrasting settings were selected to allow …


Girl, Woman, Lover, Mother: Towards A New Understanding Of Child Prostitution Among Young Devadasi Sex Workers In Rural Karnataka, India, Treena Orchard Dec 2006

Girl, Woman, Lover, Mother: Towards A New Understanding Of Child Prostitution Among Young Devadasi Sex Workers In Rural Karnataka, India, Treena Orchard

Dr. Treena Orchard

The emotive issue of child prostitution is at the heart of international debates over ‘trafficking’ in women and girls, the “new slave trade”, and how these phenomena are linked with globalization, sex tourism, and expanding transnational economies. However, young sex workers, particularly those in the ‘third world’, are often represented through tropes of victimization, poverty, and “backwards” cultural traditions, constructions that rarely capture the complexity of the girls’ experiences and the role that prostitution plays in their lives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with girls and young women who are part of the Devadasi (servant/slave of the God) system of sex …