Selling cheap sex and seashells
West, J.
Worldaids 26: 9
1993
ISSN/ISBN: 0954-6510 PMID: 12286737 Document Number: 327896
Sri Lanka became known as a gay paradise with the advent of tourism in the late 1970s. UNICEF estimates that up to 15,000 boys in Sri Lanka may engage in homosexual prostitution. Nearly 400,000 tourists visited Sri Lanka in 1992, 50,000 of them British. The probable increase of high risk sexual contacts between tourists and Sri Lankan youths worries the government's health department. By early 1993, there were only 22 cases of AIDS and 65 people who tested HIV positive. But the government's chief venereologist says there are around 200,000 cases of sexually transmitted diseases each year, and it is estimated that as many as 2500 Sri Lankans are HIV positive. In a population of 17 million, this figure is small, but it represents an increase of 300% in just over a year. The parallels with nearby Thailand, where HIV spread explosively, are ominous. Unfortunately, cultural taboos make sex education difficult. A UNICEF doctor described the first television commercials about AIDS as ridiculous. Ignorance about AIDS is almost total. Most boy prostitutes have heard of AIDS but few use condoms and none realize that the disease kills. Organizations like Save the Children Fund recognize the magnitude of the problem but admit that reaching the beach boys, who are financially independent, is difficult. In an attempt to attack the problem, 2 social organizations compiled a list of beach boys in Hikkaduwa, the most popular tourist resort, and invited them for counselling and voluntary AIDS testing, but no one showed up.