In the week running up to World AIDS Day I’ve been visiting colleges here in Orissa, in the east of India, to talk to students about HIV awareness. For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how switched on Indian teenagers are – for a country where just talking about sex, especially sex before marriage, is considered a taboo they’ve been surprisingly open and forthright about their knowledge of the topic and the value of using condoms to prevent HIV transmission.
The sessions I’ve been running have involved an essay-writing competition and they make for fascinating reading. Well, I thought so anyway. While I was marking them a teacher from the college told me to hurry up. “In India, you just read a few sentences and judge the essay on that,” he told me. Poor kids, I thought – but who knows, maybe my teachers all did the same thing?
Anyway, even if the students aren’t used to actually having their work read, for me it proved to be an invaluable way of understanding social taboos. The students went into real depth about their views and feelings about HIV.
I should emphasise that for the most part, their essays are pretty similar to those you’d expect anywhere else in the world – a mixture of dry scientific knowledge about what HIV actually is, mixed with the key messages about transmission that have obviously been drummed into them by the HIV awareness campaigns that have gone before.
However, a handful of essays caught my eye because of what they wrote about homosexuality. Here are a couple of quotes so you can see what I’m talking about:
“Homosexuality should be discouraged because it is considered to be one of the causes of this virus.”
“In both developing and developed countries, a rule should be made against homosexual sex because it leads to infection and causes the disease.”
Sadly, I can’t say I was particularly shocked to see people repeating these stereotypes. Even so, it’s maybe worth reiterating that the perception of HIV as a ‘gay plague’ is wrong. While gay men have certainly historically been more at risk of contracting HIV, according to Avert of the reported 24,296 people diagnosed with HIV in Western Europe in 2008, 42% probably acquired HIV through heterosexual contact while only 35% were men who had sex with men. Closer to home for these students, in the southern states of India HIV is primarily spread through heterosexual contact. (If you really want to get into the details – it’s anal sex, whatever your gender, that really ramps up the risk of transmission.)
When I talked to the students about this, there was a fair bit of uncomfortable squirming. If I thought talking about sex was taboo, homosexuality is really pushing it. Bear in mind that it was only last year, on 2 July 2009, that the Delhi High Court decriminalised homosexual intercourse in India. When you consider that, it’s worth celebrating that just last Sunday, hundreds of people marched through Delhi for the city’s third Gay Pride parade. The times they are a-changin’. Slowly.
Rural Orissa is not Delhi, so it’s not surprising that these views crop up – indeed I’m sure you can find the same views in countries like the UK where gay rights are much more firmly established.
It’s always a minefield when you bring your own values with you to a culture as different as India’s, but I still think it’s important to challenge homophobia whenever and wherever it arises. After all, the theme of World AIDS Day this year is ‘Universal Access and Human Rights’ – and if you think that people have the right to do whatever they want in their own bedrooms, it really shouldn’t matter what country you’re in.
No comments:
Post a Comment