Opportunities for Woman-Initiated HIV Prevention Methods among Female Sex Workers in Southern China

Abstract

Rapid changes in China over the past two decades have led to significant problems associated with population migration and changing social attitudes, including a growing sex industry and concurrent increases in STIs and HIV. This article reports results of an exploratory study of microbicide acceptability and readiness and current HIV prevention efforts among female sex workers in two rural and one urban town in Hainan and Guangxi Provinces in southern China. The study focused on these women's knowledge and cultural understandings of options for protecting themselves from exposure to STIs and HIV, and the potential viability and acceptability of woman-initiated prevention methods. We report on ethnographic elicitation interviews conducted with women working within informal sex-work establishments (hotels, massage and beauty parlors, roadside restaurants, boarding houses). We discuss implications of these findings for further promotion of woman-initiated prevention methods such as microbicides and female condoms among female sex workers in China.

We greatly appreciate the support of the Hainan Province and Guangxi Province Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCs) and the county-level Anti-Epidemic Stations for providing staffing, resources, and access to the townships in which we conducted this study. The project was funded by an AIDS-Fogarty International Research Collaboration Award (AIDS-FIRCA) (R03 TW006302, Principal Investigator, M. R. Weeks, Co-Principal Investigator, S. S. Liao). It is an affiliated study of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, a collaboration of Yale University, the Institute for Community Research, and the Hispanic Health Council (CIRA Principal Investigator, M. Merson, P01 MH/DA56826).

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