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Cambodia, Vietnam, And Cambodia

Good Essays

Introduction
Surrounded by Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, Cambodia has a population reaching slightly over 15 million people as of 2013. With a fair amount of coastline on the Gulf of Thailand, the southeast Asian nation has a rich history of agricultural societies, civil wars, and conflicts between nearby nations. Recovering from a civil war that ended in the mid 1970’s, Cambodia was recorded to have the highest rate of HIV in Asia as of the early 1990’s, with nearly sixty percent of its sex workers infected. By the mid 1990’s, the AIDS epidemic was blowing out of control in Cambodia, with drastically increasing numbers of new infections. This crisis lead to the request for international assistance by Cambodia’s government, which was …show more content…

Due to inconsistent use of condoms and an abundance of sexual partners, sex workers are ten times more likely to become infected with HIV than other adults. Oftentimes, clients will either refuse to pay for sex if a condom is used or will use violence as a way to intimidate a worker into not using a condom. In other cases, a client may offer more money to a prostitute that agrees to not use a condom, and for a woman trying to support a family the risk is often taken. Whether by choosing to become a prostitute or by being sold into the sex trade, workers have struggled to have access to condoms, have had very little power in negotiating condom use, and are often subjected to violence. Men that pay for sex are the bridge from the sex workers to the general population, by contracting diseases from the workers and spreading them to their wives and partners (Equality Now, 2009).
Problem description
Partially due to a culture that frowns upon premarital sex and promiscuity, the spread of HIV from sex workers to the rest of the population is an easy exchange, resulting in thousands of new cases of infection every year. Sex workers are affordable and willing to engage in riskier acts for more money to help support their families, therefore married men are some of the most frequent clients to both brothels and to independent sex work. These men will then pay extra or intimidate the workers into not using a condom,

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